


Latent Truths

by Indygodusk



Series: MCU Sentinel Works [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Pretender (TV), The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Alpha Sentinel Prime Parker, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, Always a woman! Steve, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Genderswap, Lion King (1994) References, Lizard-skinned Unicorns, Miss Parker (The Pretender) - Freeform, Mulan (1998) References, Oblivious Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes, Rule 63, Sentinel/Guide Bonding, Sexism, Steve dresses Male to Get It Done, Team Banter, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-06-28 14:48:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 67,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indygodusk/pseuds/Indygodusk
Summary: Latent: existing but not yet manifest; hidden; concealed.Everyone knows about Captain America, the male super soldier with artificially enhanced senses that never zone thanks to science. He now leads the Avengers. No one but Bucky (not even Steve, who’s a huge liar, self-sacrificing, and awful at self-reflection) remembers Stevie, the sickly, stubborn, latent female Sentinel who fought to protect others no matter the cost to herself. Torture destroyed Bucky’s chance to come Online as Guide, but when the Winter Soldier fails to assassinate America’s Alpha Sentinel Prime, both he and Stevie get one last chance to become their true selves.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted during the Rough Trade July 2018 Sentinel "Little Black Dress" Challenge. This story ended up being more than twice as long as the challenge limit. *sigh* I'll post chapters as I edit them, which should go quickly.

 

Stevie Rogers came of age during the great depression as a poor, Irish immigrant’s kid with bad health and _would not be shamed for it_. Fighting became a way of life in Brooklyn. Being female on top of it all just meant she had to fight smart and dirty.

Her father had died standing up for what was right in WWI. Her mother had dedicated her life to helping others as a nurse. Stevie couldn’t help but try to live up to their examples of honor and service. Few things made her as mad as injustice and bullying and in her mind, there was no justification for apathy or cruelty.

Lots of people called her tomboy, hellion, or troublemaker for all the fighting she got up to—her best friend Bucky calling her a punk didn’t count, because his eyes smiled when he said it—but a few people also called her helpful, kind, and fearless, and those were the opinions that counted. Although the parish Priest’s sighs got louder and longer each time she went to confession, and the other girls avoided her as if she might be contagious, Stevie had Bucky Barnes for a best friend and a mother who loved her daughter’s heart and that was more than good enough. When her knuckles and nose were bloody more often than not as the 1920s turned into the 1930s, when her hospital stays for pneumonia got longer and longer each winter, and when her body failed to develop curves like all the other girls, well, that was simply Stevie’s lot in life and not worth crying about. Someone else always had it worse.

Personally, she considered herself brave, stoic, and fierce. If she wanted to do something, she wouldn’t give up until she’d found a way. Unfortunately, the fragile reflection in the mirror never matched that perception; well, fragile except for her unfortunately large nose and square jaw. As other girls in the neighborhood became either sturdy or svelte, Stevie merely lost all baby fat and turned into a wire coat hanger. People either overlooked her or looked at her with pity and distaste. Very few people actually saw her for who she really was, even rarer were the people who liked what they saw.

Nevertheless, Stevie refused to let anything hold her back from living life on her terms. Better bull-headed than rabbit-hearted. She refused to passively accept things that were wrong or unfair. Even only half-grown, she knew better.

Speaking of which—"Hey Buck, do you think only boys should get to be Sentinel Captains and King of the Slide?" Talking split the scab on her lip again, dribbling a fresh trickle of blood down her chin. Her left eye also felt achy, but at least she could still see out of it, so the swelling couldn’t be too bad. If Stevie pulled her hair over her that side of her face when her Ma came home, she might not even notice the signs of fighting.

Bucky plopped down on the bench facing her with a damp cloth in one hand. "I dunno, why? Is that the stupid thing you were fighting about today?" He frowned and pressed the cloth hard against her lip to stop the bleeding.

“Ouch! And it wasn’t stupid,” she defended in a muffled voice. “Are you saying I’m not allowed to be a hero just because I’m a girl?”

“No, of course not,” Bucky sighed, lifting the cloth away, folding it, and wiping off the blood crusting her chin. “You’re the most heroic person I know, Stevie. If anyone in Brooklyn was worthy to be a Sentinel Captain like in the comics, it’d be you, but you don’t have to prove it all the time by getting your face bashed in.”  

“That’s not what happened,” she said, mollified by his answer and tipping her head back to look at the ceiling so he could clean the blood off her neck that she always missed. “Besides, I just meant on the playground. Everyone knows girls never turn into Sentinels with all five enhanced senses. That only happens in story books. I heard that sometimes a girl comes Online as a Guide, able to sense emotions and bond with a Sentinel to help level his senses and keep him from zoning out or getting sick from sensing too much in his environment, but even that’s really rare. Nobody knows why, but there aren’t many Sentinels or Guides around anymore at all, and those that do show up usually stay latent with only occasional flickers of talent and never come fully Online. The government’s so desperate they draft anyone with even a flicker of a gift for service.”

“There, done,” Bucky grunted, sitting back and tossing the bloody rag over his shoulder to land with perfect aim in the kitchen sink. “And that’s more information on Sentinels than we ever learned in class or from the comics. Where’d you even hear all that?”

“Oh, I stayed after class one day and asked a few more questions, but that’s all I got out of the teacher. Well, except for how the comics supposedly got it right: that isolation, danger, and pain can activate a latent Sentinel’s senses and turn him Online, but that the same will make a latent Guide go dormant and even destroy their chance to ever come Online or bond with a Sentinel. The Sentinel community is really secretive about how their senses work, maybe to keep people from using their weaknesses against them.”

“Or from realizing they’re lying about half of what they can do,” Bucky snorted, pulling out a deck of cards from his back pocket and dealing the two of them hands. “But getting back to your ugly mug, you never said who hit you,” he prompted with a fake casualness that utterly failed to hide the vindictive look in his cold blue eyes.

“No I didn’t,” Stevie said mulishly.

Bucky skewered her with a sharp look. “This talk of Sentinels hasn’t distracted me, Stevie. I thought you were finally going back to work today minding Mr. Babcock’s front counter after being out sick last week. So what happened?”

Scowling, Stevie discarded and drew two more cards. “He’s got a new counter girl already and refuses to take me back. I only got him to give me my back pay because Father McLaughlan walked in while we were arguing. There’re too many people looking for work in this town and not enough jobs to go around.”

“Well, he’s an idiot then,” Bucky said loyally, discarding three cards from his own hand. “You were the best counter girl he ever had.”

“Darn right I was!”

“So how did this lead to your fat lip?” Bucky circled back, refusing to be distracted.

“Fine,” she sighed with aggravation. “I had time to kill until you got done with your shift, so I made friend with this cool looking spotted dog with round ears and a short muzzle.”

Bucky tsked, “You know feeding strays is a bad idea.”

“I’ll remember that next time you’re hungry,” she mocked, placing a card on the table. “Anyways, me and the spotted dog went walking by the park and I saw big Mike and his friends playing Sentinel Captain. I wasn’t going to go in, but then little Susie Chambers, the one who broke all the running records at school even though she’s only ten,” she waited for Bucky’s nod of recognition before continuing. “She went over and asked if they wanted to play King of the Slide and do you know what they said?”

Lowering his cards, Bucky rolled his eyes, “I’m guessing something stupid that made you mad?”

“Darn right it made me mad,” Stevie cried. “Mike stopped the game of Sentinel Captain and told everyone they were going to play King of the Slide instead, but when Susie tried to join in, he pushed her down and told her she wasn’t welcome, that it didn't matter if she was the fastest kid in school, because girls aren't good for nothin' but making food and cleaning up and tending babies! He said only boys got to be Sentinel Captains and King of the Slide, that girls weren’t good enough."

"So you hit him for being a jerk and he hit you back?" Bucky asked, playing his cards.

Stevie grinned, reopening her split lip with a burst of copper on her tongue. "Nothing so simple. I’m a strategist. I waited for him to get to the top of the slide ladder and yell, ‘Boys rule and girls drool!’ Then I ran underneath and yanked his feet off the rungs. He fell face first down the slide and landed with his butt in the air. When he sat up, Susie bounced a pinecone off his forehead and he fell over again. Everyone laughed. It was great! But I don't run as fast as Susie, so he caught me on my way over here and roughed me up some. I got in a few more good hits though. The spotted dog even sat with me until I caught my breath."

Bucky frowned. “Do you need one of your asthma cigarettes or a shot?”

“Nah, I’m fine.”

Tilting his head to the side, Bucky ran his eyes critically over her face. "Least it's not too bad this time. The swelling by your eye is already going down, though it’s going to bruise. The split lip will take a few days.”

"Barely stings," Stevie boasted. At least, it had when Bucky was touching her, though that was more because he had to sit close enough that she could get lost in his familiar scent and catalogue the unique shapes of his freckles and inside his irises, could sometimes see the strange polygons that hid in his skin if she focused hard enough, could practically feel the vibration of his heartbeat and organs though his skin, but it would sound too weird to say those secrets out loud.

Everything was always better when Bucky was around, but you couldn’t just flat out say it like that or it would be weird.

Stevie was very careful to never let their friendship get weird. They were forever friends and being opposite sexes wasn’t going to change that. Bucky had already been girl crazy for years and she didn’t want any of that crazy to splash over onto her. Stevie might secretly _like him_ like him, but if things turned romantic, it would inevitably fall apart. Stevie couldn’t compete with all the gorgeous girls out there. Bucky didn’t see her like that anyways. Best friends with Bucky was loads better than being an ex and not having Bucky at all. Stevie had made up her mind and would not be swayed.

Bucky didn’t seem to notice her preoccupation, pursing his lips, leaning back, and giving her face another once-over. “Yeah, the eye and lip will be okay, but you should probably have someone look at how _ginormous_ your nose is—oh, wait, that’s its normal size. Never mind, you’re stuck with it."

“Stuck with a jerk like you, you mean,” Stevie grumbled, sticking out her tongue. Her lip stung again, but she'd had worse injuries. "And it was totally worth it. You know I hate bullies." Looking down, she rearranged her winning card hand and laid it flat on the table with a smirk.

Losing the card game with equanimity, Bucky merely sighed and dealt them both another hand. "How about next time we go to the park, I'll let you be Sentinel Captain Queen Rogers of the Slide."

"Let? Ha! I will win that title fair and square."  Dropping her cards, Stevie lunged at Bucky and tacked him to the floor. Since he wasn’t expecting it, she managed to get him in a headlock.

“You punk!” he wheezed in outrage.

“Say Uncle!” Stevie crowed.

“Never!” Wiggling like a worm, Bucky got loose and turned the tables, grabbing Stevie around the neck and yanking her down under his arm. “Who’s the King now?” he panted, grinding his knuckles on the top of her head and messing up her hair. “James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes, that’s who!”

“In your dreams!” Stevie cried, wrenching and wiggling until she got away with a triumphant grin and wheezing lungs.

A few years later—after Stevie got fired from job after demeaning job for either getting too sick or fighting with a customer, and the art jobs she wanted wouldn't even let her interview because she was a girl and not cute enough to boot; after her vision got blurry and her heart murmur got worse, and exercising too hard could cause either an asthma attack and possible suffocation or her already high blood pressure to skyrocket and then abruptly drop, leading to vomiting and unconsciousness; after her ma’s hours got cut at the hospital and money became even tighter so they couldn’t afford her asthma shots or even the cigarettes anymore and just breathing while sitting still became a constant battle; after the doctor told her she’d probably not live to thirty, that her irregular periods were a sign she was unlikely to ever get pregnant, and that if she did get pregnant, both she and the babe would die in the attempt; after she found out Bucky was almost killing himself not sleeping so he could take shady midnight jobs from gangsters after twelve hour days at the docks to get the extra money needed to buy Stevie the packs of asthma cigarettes and fresh fruit that started "mysteriously" showing up in her room (as if it could be anyone but him)—that's when Stevie first became Steve.

Stephanie “Stevie” Grania Rogers had too many things stacked against her to win at life. She was drowning. Maybe a “Steve” could do better at keeping his head above the water, do better at hitting that home run. After all, if you’re losing the fight before even stepping up to bat, change the rules to give yourself better odds. She put away her childish dreams of female Sentinel Captains, of ever having her reflection match her inner self, or of one day marrying and having a family with a man (more specifically with Bucky, which was a stupid dream anyways, because all the girls he charmed but never stayed with just proved that Bucky was a horrible boyfriend and would probably be an awful husband, so she should just keep him as a best friend, because he was perfectly wonderful at that).

Stevie cut her hair and put on Bucky's outgrown clothes. Stealing his second-best tie and a glob of Brylcreem to slick down her hair, Steve threw back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and looked in the mirror, finding a rail-thin, stubborn-faced young man staring back at her. Well then. When she got a job drawing advertisement posters at the first agency “Steve” applied for, one “Stevie” had been turned away from twice, she knew she’d made the right decision to become a he.

Ma cried about it, but once Steve laid out her arguments, she didn’t try to change Steve’s mind. She just got quiet and sad and gave Steve a better haircut. Bucky was weird about it at first, but in the end he came around too. Unfortunately, that meant he ramped up his teasing to show support. When the Parish Priest got transferred out and forgot to inform his replacement about Stevie, the last big impediment was gone. Pretty soon everyone seemed to forget Steve had ever been a girl in the first place.

When Steve’s Ma died of TB and things got really dark, Bucky found a cheap room for two fellas to share and took care of everything. He curtained off Stevie’s bed and a private area for her to bathe in next to the stove. To be honest, Bucky cared a lot more for Steve’s modesty and reputation than she did.

The apartment was only a single room with a fire escape and a bathroom in the hall they shared with two other families. They could only afford it by paying for rent with almost all of Bucky’s dockyard wages. Food and everything else came from Steve’s art commissions.

That meant that when illness kept Steve from working, food got scarce. When Bucky began getting suspiciously full after only a few bites, leaving Steve the lion’s share, and lost weight he couldn’t afford as a dock laborer, Steve threw her pride out the window and went begging for extra paid work from her coworkers. One of them put her in contact with the seedier side of the art industry, which is how she came to start drawing pinup girls. As a bonus, it paid better than store ads and quickly restocked the pantry. Steve avoided nudes out of embarrassment and fear of what her Ma would think up in heaven, keeping to tasteful but titillating sketches a fella could hang up in a work locker.

Bucky's face turned purple when he first found out about the pinups, but after a few days of blushing every time he saw her sketching, he got over it. Pretty soon Steve missed the blushing. Instead, he started badgering her to see the self-portraits she was selling and teasing about getting a large mirror for the wall by her bed to get the anatomy right.

Bucky was such an idiot.

As if anyone would want to see, much less pay money for, a picture of Stevie’s small breasts and stick legs. Annoyed and offended, Steve stubbornly refused to let him see any of her pinup sketches. It made her unhappy to think of him getting excited over some fantasy girl she’d created, especially when those girls always looked the exact opposite of Steve herself.

Plus, as time went on, she especially didn’t want Bucky to find out that her most popular sketches were of a sexy, buxom brunette with Bucky's plump lips, dimpled chin, and blue eyes. Jamie the pin up girl was a best seller and had a whole series. Steve’s editor was half in love with Jamie and kept angling for an introduction, certain she was a real girl. Steve was half in love with her creation herself, which was easier than being all in love with the real Bucky, so she didn’t fight it too hard.


	2. Chapter 2

 

When Bucky got home from work, he only meant to sit down on the couch for a minute, but Steve was sitting in the chair by the open window sketching peacefully, suspenders down around her waist, white shirt billowing in the warm breeze, collar unbuttoned to show the hollow of her throat, and the rays of the setting sun reaching in like the fingers of Midas, turning her to gold. She looked like a goddess. Bucky was warm and the couch was soft and his eyes got too heavy to keep open.

In his dream, Bucky padded through a blue forest, vibrant and exotic, especially for a city boy. Something wonderful was waiting for him just past the next tree, but it kept darting away just before he got there. The closest he got was a brush of soft fur on the tips of his fingers.

When he woke up, Steve had turned her back to the dark window and was now sketching him by the light of her lamp. He blinked lazily and stretched. She met his eyes and gave him an enigmatic smile, but for the first time, Bucky felt a warm wash of emotion accompanying that smile, a mixture of indulgence and feminine appreciation. They weren’t his feelings. They were _Stevie’s_. It felt amazing, transcendent, safety and overwhelming, rocksteady loyalty and _love_ , so much love. Bucky felt humbled.

A transparent white wolf was lying across his shins, but Bucky wasn’t afraid. The wolf had to be his spirit friend. A regal nod of the wolf’s head let him know the thought was correct. Peace and contentment suffused his soul.

Bucky remembered hushed family secrets told long ago by his father before he turned into a mean old drunk, stories about his grandfather who could sense emotions and had an animal friend that would visit from the astral plane, a spirit that only other Gifted could see. Spirit animals weren’t common knowledge, since even Stevie hadn’t been able to find out about them during her brief fascination with Sentinels during school.

The Guide gift had been passed down to at least one child in the Barnes family for hundreds of years, going all the way back to when they were still the Barn family, which was Old Norse for young warrior. Then inexplicably Bucky’s father and almost all of the other children born to families known for faithfully producing Sentinels and Guides turned out mundane. By the start of the twentieth century, the Gifted the world over had almost all disappeared. His father’s bitterness over being cheated of his legacy had been too great to speak of it often and Bucky hadn’t listened closely since he didn’t think he’d ever come Online. He regretted that now.

Nevertheless, the evidence seemed clear. Bucky seeing a spirit animal and feeling Stevie’s emotions had to mean he was a latent Guide starting to come Online. They’d said in school that such gifts, while rare, usually showed up in young adults. Some people came Online all at once. Others could go years with only the occasional flicker of their gift manifesting. There was even the chance he’d always be latent and never come fully Online, living most of his life as a sensitive.

However, if he’d always been a latent Guide, it would explain his ability to read people and know just how to charm them. It would explain his strange instincts. And it would explain the bone deep certainty Bucky had felt from the first moment he’d seen a young Stevie taking a punch to the face and not falling down, the certainty that this girl was his to protect and follow. That she was his, full stop.

The truth became clear: Stevie was meant to be his Sentinel and Bucky was meant to be her Guide.

Bucky lost the ability to speak as he locked gazes with Stevie and had his life-altering epiphany. Bemused by his uncharacteristic silence and intensity, Stevie tilted her head to the side in a silent question. When he opened and closed his mouth in silence before shrugging, still unable to put his feelings into words, she gave him a gentle smile and returned to her sketching. Curiosity, patience, and affection curled through the room and around his shoulders like a beloved pet, bringing tears to his eyes at the beauty and perfection of her mind. A pressure on his mind he hadn’t even noticed until it was gone had disappeared, as if she were shielding him somehow.

All too soon, the warm weight of the white wolf on his legs dissipated as the animal faded away back to the blue forest of his dream. His window into Stevie’s emotions faded with it, leaving him once more alone in his mind and strangely vulnerable. Bucky felt an ache, as if the brief touch of Stevie’s energy had created an empty space in his soul that hurt when she wasn’t there to fill it.

“You okay there, Buck?” Stevie asked gently.

It reminded him that if he was starting to come Online, it should only be a matter of time before his Sentinel followed, allowing them to bond spiritually, emotionally, and physically. This strange new emptiness would stop then and Stevie would finally have to see that he was good enough for her, that they were meant to be more than just friends and closer than just spouses. The thought made him smile. “I’m perfect,” he said, and he was. That moment, that day, it was all perfect.

But no matter how long and patiently Bucky waited, or the random and sometimes uncomfortable flickers of emotion he got from people on the street proving that he hadn’t imagined it, that he really was a Latent Guide on the cusp of coming Online, no matter how many headaches he forced himself to ignore, no matter how many of his Ma’s Anglican Prayers or, copying Steve, Catholic Hail Mary’s Bucky said… Stevie didn’t present as a Sentinel with enhanced senses and a need to bond with her waiting Guide named Bucky.

In fact, after the cycle of fevers that winter, instead of her senses getting better, Steve’s eyesight and hearing seemed to be getting worse, along with her asthma. Each spring it seemed to take Steve longer to recover her health. It was something they both recognized but didn’t speak about. Bucky didn’t know how to help. Steve’s temper got shorter and everything seemed to make her angry. Bucky’s own mood became dark.

World events kept getting darker and more dangerous too. War had broken out in Europe. Germany had started by invading Poland and hadn’t really slowed down their bullying since. The Japanese Empire also seemed more aggressive with every news cycle. Countries around the world were raising armies, including the US.

Work at the docks had kicked into high gear in response. Longer hours meant more money, but it also left him more exhausted and raised the risk of injury. He rarely had time to go dancing anymore and his good time girls had all drifted off to greener pastures, finally accepting that he would never commit to anything more serious. Unless he found a dame content to play second fiddle to Steve in his life, or Stevie took pity on him and let him marry her, he’d probably spend the rest of his life as a bachelor, though playboy bachelor wasn’t such a bad title, at the end of the day.

Of course, the current heat wave just made everything seem harder. He and Steve had been forced to sleep out on the fire escape to keep from melting inside their roasting hot apartment. Waking up with Stevie’s sweet little body pressed so close was tempting him something awful. So far he’d kept all his body parts and inappropriate thoughts to himself, but at this point he should be nominated for sainthood.

His Guide gift blinking on and off didn’t help either. Getting flashes of Steve’s own attraction to him was the worst kind of tease. Just because she dressed like a boy didn’t mean he couldn’t see how gorgeous she was or that he didn’t love her more than ever. However, when he tried to do something about it, it always went wrong. His flirtations got ignored, misunderstood, or shot down as annoying teasing. It drove him crazy.

Bucky tried to hide the strain of it all, but there were only so many cigarettes one could smoke before the chemical relaxation of nicotine just wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, even Steve wasn’t dense enough to overlook Bucky’s problems forever. Since Steve refused to comprehend that Bucky’s love wasn’t platonic, and talking about his little latent Guide problem could only make things worse, he started throwing other excuses at her. Bucky took to complaining about his bad work conditions and the looming threat of war instead. It worked at first, but then Steve started getting even more worked up about it all than he ever had.

Steve had a bit of an anger problem.

He hadn’t realized just how passionate she’d gotten about making a difference against Germany, the great bully of Europe, until he found out she’d applied to two foreign aid services and tried to enlist in the army as a man. They all rejected her application. For once he was actually grateful for her bad health. Of course, this put Steve in a foul mood.

To make up for it, she turned the full focus of her attention back on solving Bucky’s problems. She’d tricked him into admitting that it wasn’t his work on the docks or world events that had him tied up in knots. It all went downhill from there. From the second he entered their apartment after work to the moment he left the next morning, Steve badgered Bucky to talk about his feelings. It was all the hassle of having a wife without any of the perks. Like a dog with a bone, Steve just wouldn’t quit.

One blistering hot summer evening he just couldn’t take it anymore. Even though they’d just finished dinner, he slammed back from the table, announced, “I’m going to bed,” and crawled right out onto the fire escape.

Setting her jaw, Steve followed on his heels right over the windowsill. “Stop running away! Just tell me what’s going on so I can help.”

Bucky threw his hands in the air. “Give it a rest already! Knowing the problem isn’t going to help!”

Steve crossed her arms. “You don’t know how much help I can give unless you tell me the problem,” she insisted doggedly, staring him down. The look in her eyes was a mix between an adorable puppy at the pet store and a dangerous hunting dog about to bite down. Either way, there was no escaping that look.

Swearing, Bucky lit a cigarette and took a long drag, making sure to blow the smoke away from Steve so as not to aggravate her asthma.

Steve stared harder and then sat down pointedly on the fire escape. _Adorable, dangerous,_ and _irresistible._ Quitting wasn’t in her vocabulary.

Bucky wiped the sweat off his brown and tried one last excuse. “Look, it’s not as bad as you’re thinking.”

“You didn’t get some poor girl pregnant?” Steve asked evenly.

“What!? No!” Bucky choked.

“You didn’t kill somebody and forget to hide the body?”

Lips going thin, Bucky glared. “Steve. No.”

“Then you’re right, it’s not as bad as I was thinking,” she leaned back on her hands and smirked evilly.

Bucky scowled. “You’re a punk.”

“So? What is the big secret?” Steve cajoled, tilting her head to the side winsomely.

Tipping his head back to look at the pinprick of stars just starting to appear out of the dusk, Bucky took a final drag of his cigarette. He nervously tapped it on the railing three times and then tossed it away. Talking about this was a bad idea, but he just couldn’t resist her anymore.

The family in the rooms to the left was gone on vacation to the country. The baby crying in the apartment below let him know they were too distracted to be eavesdropping. The nearby windows and fire escapes looked empty, but he didn’t want to be overheard. He’d have to keep his voice down. Bucky rubbed the back of his neck and then just spit it out, “I’m a Latent Guide.”

After a beat of silence, Steve barked an incredulous laugh and brushed a bead of sweat off her temple with the back of her hand. “That’s not funny. C’mon, what’s the real problem?”

Bucky pressed his lips tight and shot her an angry look. “I told you.” Steve flinched in shock and shrank in on herself. She didn’t ask Bucky to repeat himself again. Looking down, Bucky fingered the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, but didn’t pull one out.

The silence stretched.

When he finally looked back over, Steve had gone as pale as winter grass. “Well… congratulations, I guess,” she said in a suspiciously even tone of voice.

“I don’t want your congratulations,” Bucky growled, temper firing.

An obviously forced smile appeared on Steve’s face. “You’re my friend. Of course I’d say congratulations.”

Bucky hated the fake smile. He wanted to pull her into a headlock and grind his knuckles into her head until she started shrieking at him instead, until she stopped lying with her face and just said something honest and selfish, said what he really wanted to hear. “Never mind,” he snapped, starting to turn away, half-considering taking the ladder down to the ground and wandering off somewhere until her lack of understanding didn’t make his heart hurt so much.

Taking a quick breath, Steve leaned forward. “No, wait,” she said earnestly. “This’ll be great for you. Being a,” she lowered her voice, “a Guide, even just a latent, is a guaranteed meal ticket. It’s a chance at a better life and a way to make a difference. The work’s got to be easier and safer than what you do at the docks.”

She swallowed and wrapped her arms tightly around her knees, no longer looking him in the face. “When are you thinking about registering? You could get in trouble if you don’t do it soon.”

Wrapping his hands around the metal of the fire escape, Bucky squeezed hard. “Does it look like I care about trouble? I’m not going to register. I’m Latent. There’s no way to prove someone’s latent or a sensitive. Besides, once registered, the government owns you. They send you away and make you partner with a military Sentinel of their choosing. It doesn’t matter if you’re latent and not able to bond or do whatever else it is Guides have to do for Sentinels. It’s practically slavery. Plus, I might never see you again.”

Face solemn, Steve quietly argued, “It doesn’t have to be like that. It might be good. They’ll guarantee you a better life. More food. No longer having to work yourself to death. Maybe even a chance to finish your schooling, if you wanted that. I don’t want to be the one holding you back.” Bucky sent her an angry look—he hated when she got self-sacrificing—but Steve ignored it and kept on doggedly arguing. “Of course I’ll… I’ll miss you, but I’ll be fine. My art’s making more money now. This is your chance, Bucky. You should take it. With how few gifted there are anymore, you could make a real difference in the world. Plus, joining up will give you the best chance of meeting and bonding with the Sentinel meant specifically for you. Whomever your Sentinel is, I’m sure they’re going to be amazing.”

Bucky wrung the metal pipe between his fingers in lieu of her neck. Sweat dripped off the ends of his hair and disappeared into the dark alley below. “Of course they’re amazing,” he snarled, “but I’m not going anywhere because I don’t need the government to help me find them. I’ve already found my idiot latent Sentinel.”

If possible, Steve curled up into an even tighter ball of misery as she focused on her knees and asked on a puff of air, “Oh? That’s—that’s great. Who?”

She looked ill. If she passed out on him now or excused herself to be sick inside, he was going to give her something to really puke about. There was a new roller coaster at the fair that would work perfectly.

“You stupid punk, who do you think it is?” Bucky sent her a scornful look and took a step forward until he was staring straight down at her on the narrow fire escape. The hot, still air made his skin prickle with sweat and flamed his temper higher.

Darting a startled glance up, she went back to staring holes in her knees. “...That’s... not funny. I’m not… I’m just me, small and sickly. No hawk eyes or bloodhound nose, no bat ears or spider web sensitivity, no—no whatever animal tastes really well.” She threw a hand out and then retracted it to tug hard on her short hair. “Besides, everyone knows only boys can be Sentinels. Just because I dress this way to get work doesn’t mean my plumbing’s gotten any different,” she finished on a whisper.

When Stevie knuckled away a tear, Bucky’s fiery temper collapsed into a heap of wet ashes. “Stevie... _Stephanie_... please,” he begged.

Seized by impulse, Bucky bent down and tried to kiss Stevie for the very first time, tried to persuade and comfort her with his lips, but all his luck and experience with dames completely deserted him. Seeing his lunge only peripherally, she moved her head at the last moment to look at him. Instead of luscious and slow, the kiss hit her lips off-center and too hard, bruising and becoming something sloppy and quick. Her teeth nicked his lower lip when she jumped in surprise, leaving a bright red smear of his blood on her mouth like a damning brand.

Eyes going wide, Steve’s tongue flicked out, licking off the blood. She inhaled sharply and her eyes lost focus. Otherwise, she didn’t respond to the kiss, just dropped her head and stared off into space.

Feeling slightly hysterical, both his pride and his lip hurting, Bucky found it entirely appropriate that Steve should extract a blood payment for his temerity. _What had he been thinking!?_ Silently cursing himself for a fool, Bucky quickly backpedaled so he wasn’t looming. His back smacked painfully against the railing in the narrow space.

Gulping a breath, he held out his hands and tried one more time. “Stevie, I know to the depths of my soul that you are meant to be with me, meant to be my Sentinel.”

Finally she responded. A fine trembling shook her curled up form as she turned her face firmly away. “We both know that’s impossible. I don’t know why you’re doing this, but you need to stop joking now.”

“I’m not joking,” Bucky said wearily, scrubbing his hands over his face and raking back his sweat soaked hair.

Abruptly Steve surged to her feet. “Well, you’re not being serious either,” she snapped with anger, turning clumsily and clambering back over the windowsill to go inside before he could gather his wits.

“What are you—Steve! Get back here! We’re not done talking about this and it’s hotter than an oven in there,” Bucky barked.

“It’s better than the hot air you’re spewing, James Buchanan Barnes! Good night!” With that, Stevie yanked shut the curtain around her bed with an angry rattle and disappeared from view. Her breathing had a rasp to it that Bucky worried would turn into an asthma attack, but he didn’t dare pull back the curtain to offer help. Not unless the sound got worse.

Bucky had told Stevie the complete, unvarnished truth and she still hadn’t accepted it. Had she even noticed him baring his heart to her and calling her his soulmate? No, she’d just gotten mad and pretended the awkward kiss and confessions hadn’t happened, had assumed he’d been joking. This is why he’d been avoiding having this conversation. Now they were both hurting and nothing had gotten solved.

Throwing himself back down on the corner of the fire escape, Bucky lit another cigarette and sucked hard, trying to calm down. In a moment of divine irony, his Guide gift chose that moment to manifest again, forcing him to feel Stevie’s misery first hand in addition to his own. Not only was she mentally hurting, but he could also vaguely sense that her body was doing something she found strange and confusing. Hopefully she wasn’t getting sick again. The baby in the flat below was teething and his sleep-deprived mother and father were at the end of their ropes to boot. The kid in the flat on the right was having a nightmare and scared out of her wits.

Bucky had no idea how to block any of the negative emotions. The mental pain felt excruciating. _Great, just great._ This is what Bucky got for being honest: a kick in the head.


	3. Chapter 3

Six months later, Bucky was still latent and Steve was still in denial. They avoided speaking about the subject of Guides or awkward kisses and moved on. Despite that, life started going pretty well for Bucky. Snow fell on Brooklyn. Work lightened enough for Bucky to take an art class with Stevie at the local college. They were even going to go to a zoo for the first time and see some animals besides stray dogs, pigeons, and rats.

Then they got word that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. America entered the War. Everything changed.

Almost before he could blink, Bucky got drafted. Steve desperately tried to enlist, to volunteer, to somehow get herself sent to Europe to join the fight, but no one would take her. She would be left behind in Brooklyn, which was good, but without him to watch her back and keep her from doing something stupid, which was potentially disastrous.

This forced Bucky to take extreme measures.

“What is this?” Steve asked in an arctic tone of voice, slamming a fist on the paper Bucky had left prominently on her side of the kitchen table.

“You can read, can’t you?” Bucky was shining his shoes for the fourth time and trying to look calm. He was hoping logic would work where emotion had previously failed. “It’s the paperwork to get married so you can collect my paychecks. Also my death benefits if I, you know, kick the bucket in the war.”

He was proud of how nonchalant his voice sounded, considering how desperately he needed her to say yes. Not only did he want her to become Stevie Barnes before he left in the worst way, he wanted her to have the protection of his name once he was gone. Being a wife or widow would open doors for her that were currently closed if she ever decided to stop being a Steve.

Thank goodness the government had refused to take her when she tried to enlist in the war effort. The medical corps suggested she just volunteer locally instead of trying to serve overseas. The WAC and WASP wouldn’t take her either, on account of her poor health and her ma having TB, even when she learned to lie about the TB on the form or tried to sign up in a different city. There was important work to be done here at home, even good factory jobs opening up with all of the men disappearing, but Steve didn’t care. When others were laying down their lives overseas to help, she found it cowardly to stay safe out of the war. If there were a better hearted person ever born than Stevie Rogers, he would eat his hat. Nevertheless, it made him feel better, knowing she wouldn’t be in the same sort of danger he’d be facing, even if that very same fact infuriated her.

Steve scowled mightily at the paper beneath her fist. “This is stupid. I don’t need your pity, Buck, and I’m not marrying you for your money. I’m not going to use you like that.”

“Maybe I want to be used, doll,” Bucky said flirtatiously, lounging back and sending her a smoldering look from beneath his lashes. In the dance halls, that look always garnered him at least an approach, if not a dance or something even more. Women couldn’t help but respond to that look.

Except for Steve, considering the unimpressed purse of her lips. Rolling her elegantly thin shoulders, Steve looked away before saying abruptly, “If we got married, one of us would end up a widow much too early. Better to just stay friends. That’s simpler. Safer.” She balled up the paper and threw it into the trash. It missed, bouncing off the rim and landing on the floor. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

Bucky felt like she’d stabbed him in the heart.

Seconds later, he realized she wasn’t alluding to the specter of his death in the upcoming War, but of her own; that she’d rather die as his friend than as his wife because she thought it would hurt _him_ less. Steve was such an ass. Bucky felt angry and offended. Humiliated too, because no matter how he threw himself at her, Stevie always shut him down and unfairly acted the role of the offended party, even when he could feel from her own emotions that she loved and wanted him too. Why was she so stubborn?

In a flash, Bucky was on his feet, planting his hands flat on the table and leaning forward. “Dammit, Stevie, can’t you give in just once?”

“Nope.” Steve crossed her arms mulishly.  “I never learned how.”

Bucky threw his hands up in the air and then dropped back down into his chair in aggravation.

A minute later, Steve’s scuffed up shoes landed on the newspaper in front of his clenched fists. “Here, shine mine for me too, while you’re at it.”

“You are such a punk,” Bucky sighed, picking up her left shoe and dabbing polish on the worst of the scuffs before starting to scrub at the marks.

“And you’re an idiot,” Steve said affectionately, benevolent in her victory.

A few weeks later when Bucky shipped out for basic training, Steve was still legally Stephanie Rogers.

 

* * *

 

The week before Sergeant Bucky Barnes boarded a ship bound for Europe, he took Steve to the fair. Along the way, Bucky had picked up a pair of girls to hang out with them on a double date, because, he claimed, “even if you don’t want a husband or need a girlfriend, you could always use more friends who just happen to be girls, especially once I’m gone.”

Steve was pretty sure Bucky just used her as an excuse to make time with two girls at once. Ever since puberty, he’d gone dizzy with the dames. A combination of insanity and overprotectiveness had probably led him to the fool notion to marry Steve in the first place. He couldn’t really want her as a wife. Whatever the case, none of the women on these double dates ever seemed interested in Steve for either friendship or romance. Like Steve, they were only there for Bucky. Tonight was just more of the same.

When she was pressed up against Bucky, she somehow could see the stage with perfect clarity, but when the crowd and his dates pushed her too far back, her bad eyesight made everything far away blurry. It was a curious effect she’d never bothering figuring out.

Since no one was paying attention to her anyway, Steve slipped away for a breath of fresh air. Her favorite spotted alley dog was lurking near the Enlistment Center across the street, watching a dove with intense focus. Steve couldn’t help but wander over and think about trying to enlist again for the sixth time.

When Bucky tracked her down to the display inside the recruitment center, they got into another argument, fighting about Steve’s reasons for wanting to do her part in standing up and fighting for what’s right. Bucky wanted her safely tucked away in an art gallery or factory on this side of the Atlantic. They always seemed to talk past each other lately, but at least in the end Bucky always had her back. Steve would not change her mind. Exasperated but loyal, he engulfed her in a hard hug and left her to do what she thought was best.

Steve tried to enlist again, now smooth at explaining her true gender and willingness to serve in the WAC or WASP. In the middle of her explanation, the dove from outside came darting past the curtain, though the doctor didn’t seem to notice it. Abruptly a nurse pulled the doctor out, leaving Steve alone.

Moments later, Dr. Abraham Erskine stepped into the room and asked Steve a few questions about why she wanted to serve so badly, confronting her with her previous attempts. “I’m a Guide, so I warn you not to lie,” he said calmly, piercing her with a look that saw straight into her soul. Steve spoke from the heart and changed the course of her life.

To test Dr. Erskine’s Super Soldier Serum, the Strategic Scientific Reserve chose one male and one female recruit. Stevie was that female recruit. The goal of the serum was to turn a mundane into a super human, with enhanced strength, speed, and endurance. If possible, they hoped the serum would also create senses on par with a bonded Sentinel without the downsides, like zoning out on one sense or the instinctive need to bond with a Guide. As a lady (and also more expendable to the program than the male soldiers needed at the front), they let Steve go first.

The night before the test, Dr. Erskine came to talk bearing a bottle of schnapps. “Why choose me?” Stevie couldn’t help but ask, looking down to scratch at the rash that liked to come and go on her wrist.

“To explain, I must tell you a little of my past,” Erskine said after a moment of thought. “In Germany, I was forced to give an earlier version of the serum to a powerful and brilliant man close to Hitler named Johann Schmidt. My serum worked… but at the same time it went... wrong.”

Swallowing, Erskine looked down at the bottle in his hands, rolling it between his fingers. His dove appeared on his shoulder and nuzzled into his neck. Erskine looked back up at Steve with quiet intensity. “The serum takes everything latent and amplifies it. _Everything_.” He gave her a speaking look, as if he was referencing a shared secret, but she was lost. Before she could ask, he continued. “With the serum, good becomes great and bad becomes worse. But you, Stephanie, you know what it means to be weak, to have unrealized powers, and in that weak and latent state have learned how to value strength and compassion, to not take it for granted.”

“Thanks. I guess,” she said wryly.

The Doctor nodded. “Whatever happens tomorrow, promise me that you will stay who you are, not a perfect soldier, but a good man... woman,” he corrected himself with a shrug. “Be a good person, Stephanie, and try to keep your male counterpart, Teddy, good too. I have more worries about the temper of his heart. Which,” he poured them both generous slugs of liquor, “is why I’m drinking in here with you.”

Suddenly he snatched away the glass she’d just picked up, “But you shouldn’t drink before the test! No liquids! I will drink today, you will drink tomorrow, and together we will stay up and talk of philosophy and life, yes?”

The next day, instead of killing her or being a dud, the serum succeeded beyond Stevie’s wildest imaginings. She stepped out of the vita-chamber with a tall, healthy, and strong body with amazingly acute senses. She could actually hear Peggy Carter’s heart pounding faster in excitement and smell the enticing aroma of her perfume. Steve’s thoughts turned to Bucky, his absence by her side like a gaping wound.

Everyone cheered, but within minutes, Steve was shoved to the back corner of the room. Teddy was the main attraction here, not her. They all wanted to see the first of many male Super Soldiers made by science. Steve was just a test case.

When Teddy, the male recruit, eagerly leaped forward to go into the chamber being reset by Dr. Erskine, a gunshot rang out. The bullet passed through Dr. Erskine and into Teddy, killing them both. The only other prepared dose of serum in existence fell from Dr. Erskine’s hands and shattered onto the floor.

Feelings of both retribution and guilt at the death of the good doctor surged through Steve’s body. She’d failed to protect the man who’d given her this chance. Reacting quickly, Steve and Peggy chased after the German spy, finally capturing him in the harbor, only to have him use a poisoned tooth to suicide. The celebration of only moments before had turned into defeat.

It turned out that no one could recreate the serum without Dr. Erskine. Operation Rebirth collapsed. The Generals and politicians in charge were left with only Stevie, a tall and muscular female, not the army of enhanced male soldiers they’d been promised. They were not pleased. Steve’s fate stayed in limbo for weeks.

Finally they had a meeting that included Steve, so she made sure to use the opportunity to petition them for some action. “Sirs, at the very least, I’d like to join our soldiers on the front to fight and do my part in the War.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Rogers,” snapped one of the four stars sitting at the table in the middle of the room. “We’re here to discuss your fate, not be subjected to your female power fantasies. Keep quiet unless you’re asked a question.”

Grinding her teeth, Steve obeyed orders and sank down in a chair against the wall. She grabbed the armrest too hard and accidentally cracked it, still not used to her super strength. No one seemed to notice. Even with her new and improved body, people still didn’t give her any respect.

After an hour of discussion about the program in general, the committee called in Steve’s new doctor to testify about her status. “Tell us, Dr. Ingram, did Erskine’s Serum do more than just make Rogers bigger? Did it turn her into a real Sentinel?”

Dr. Ingram adjusted his tie pretentiously. Steve had daydreamed about strangling the good doctor with that tie several times over the last few weeks. His tests had felt like government sanctioned torture. If she’d caught them doing it to anyone else, she would have punched somebody. But all alone and without purpose, she’d merely endured. Her skin crawled just from being in the same room with the man.

“From our tests, we can report that Stephanie G. Rogers is now in peak health, unlike her former sickly state. She both grew taller and gained significant muscle mass. Her five senses are also now enhanced and on par with the average unbonded Sentinel in our armed forces. However, to answer your second question, General, I would not call her a ‘real’ Sentinel. Despite our efforts, we were not able to force her senses to zone or to create a single allergic hive on the subject’s skin, all problems experienced by normal Sentinels, though high levels of stimuli do slow down her response times and the subject reported feeling skin irritation that could not be independently verified. The subject also showed no reaction to smelling the blood of unbonded Guides. Normally, unbonded Sentinels experience aroused physiology and an interest in tasting and scenting the blood of Guides to look for potential matches. As an aside, none of the rumored ways of inducing a Feral state seemed to have any effect on the subject’s rationality or ability to distinguish friend from foe, though the limits of the lab environment may have biased that finding, since we couldn’t actually put a child in real danger for the test.”

A Sergeant Major at the table cleared his throat uneasily. “How rigorous were your tests? I would argue that from what I’ve heard, a Feral Sentinel is more deadly than a TB outbreak, and as a female, the stories say she’s more prone to both hysteria and going Feral. Is it even safe for her to be wandering around without a permanent pair of MPs assigned?”

“What is this Feral state you’re talking about?” a Senator asked with a frown.

Dr. Ingram cleared his throat and leaned forward. “In Sentinels, going Feral is an enhanced battle state triggered by feelings of extreme protectiveness or distress. It is very rare and almost never documented. Most of the factual knowledge on Sentinel and Guide behavior was passed down in oral traditions and so has been lost to us when the populations of those communities collapsed during the latter half of the previous century. In the stories and myths that survive, Feral behavior is almost always reported in Sentinels protecting children or mates, and most of those stories focus on female Sentinels and children. It is a popular topic of Sentinel movies and urban legends, making it seem much more common than it actually is.”

“But those stories do paint a sober picture,” the Sergeant Major defended. “A Feral Sentinel can't be reasoned with. They will attack everyone, even their former allies, except for the specific person or group they were defending when the Feral state began, and will keep fighting until they drop dead. A Feral Sentinel doesn’t zone. The usual way to get around a Feral Sentinel was to wait until they passed out from exhaustion or blood loss. A bonded Guide could sometimes work, but if the bond was weak, the empathic strain would cause the bond to break and the Sentinel to attack the former Guide as if they were an enemy.”

“One tribe in Africa, one of the few who never had problems with the slave trade, has stories of sending in other Sentinels to remove the children in danger to safety and thus end the Feral state that way. However, sometimes the new Sentinel would get infected by the Feral state and join the first, setting off a chain reaction that could lead to packs of Feral Sentinels slaughtering hundreds. No one approached a group of feral Sentinels, not even bonded Guides. They killed everyone who tried.”  

Dr. Ingram gave a loud sigh. “Stories and myths from African Tribes and Grandmothers with shaky memories. I repeat, Feral behavior in Sentinels is very rare. Additionally, I do not think it even applies to Ms. Rogers because she isn’t a real Sentinel. If she can’t zone, doesn’t show skin sensitivity, and fails to react to the blood of unbonded Guides, the probability of her being capable of a Feral state is so low as to be practically zero. Her enhanced senses are fake, created out of a bottle. In conclusion, the serum seems to have successfully created the type of invulnerable, Guide-free Sentinel we were looking for.”

Although Dr. Ingram sounded smugly confident in his pronouncement, Steve just couldn’t believe it. Everything in her cried out that this was _real_ , that an Online Sentinel was what she had always been meant to be. Hadn’t Bucky once tried to tell her that they were a latent Guide and Sentinel pair? It didn’t feel like a joke now. It felt like a hidden truth coming to light.

Next time they met, Steve would be good enough and strong enough and _real_ enough to finally let herself love Bucky the way he deserved to be loved. She could be with him the way fate had always intended; the way she’d always wanted to be with him but had been too scared to try. When they bonded, it would prove to everyone that she was a real Sentinel.

One of the politicians sporting a bad comb over snorted, bringing Steve back to the unpleasant conversation at hand. “Excuse me, Doctor, but a fat lot of good Roger’s fake Sentinel status does us if we can’t reproduce it. Besides, look at her! She’s a circus freak! We’d be made a mockery on the world stage if we tried to trot her out in public. They’d call her the sister of the bearded lady!”

Steve bit her tongue and forced herself to keep quiet. A muscle in her jaw ticked. She wanted to punch that guy in the face, but it would just make her situation worse. She had to wait.

“Hey, there’s a thought,” Howard Stark interjected with forced levity. He was the engineer of the vita-chamber and a big financial backer of the failed program. Their interactions had been distant, but friendly. “With a little stage training, we could turn Rogers into some kind of…,” he screwed up his face in thought and twirled his hand in the air, “of _Miss American Pie_ or maybe a _Captain America_. Yeah, that might fit better with the war effort. Have Captain America perform around the country with a bunch of chorus girls, drum up support for the war effort. ‘Come see the female Sentinel made with Science, if she can do her part, so can you.’ That sort of thing.”

“Before we commission an extra-large star-spangled dress and mask,” sneered a thin, narrow-faced General, “have we explored the option of using her to breed the soldiers we need?”

Steve dug her fingers into her thighs to keep from surging to her feet and stalking out of the room in outrage. This entire hearing, she’d been treated like a thing instead of a person. It had already been explained to her that if she tried to go anywhere without orders, including leaving the building without permission, she would be considered AWOL and sent to a military prison.  It was still tempting to get up and storm out, but no matter how it chafed, she’d be better served keeping track of who said what in here than leaving. Ignorance could lead her to a fate worse than mere imprisonment or death.

Clearing his throat to garner attention, Dr. Ingram leaned forward. “Such a plan would take decades to produce a very limited number of results, assuming the serum breeds true and that we kept her constantly pregnant. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible right now. The subject still hasn’t started ovulation or menses, even with several rounds of hormone shots. Until she does, she won’t be able to get pregnant. Reproductive function might never come back. We don’t know what affect the serum had on that system. For all intents and purposes, the subject isn’t a normally functioning woman at all.”

The politician sporting a comb over grimaced, “So like I said, she’s a circus freak.”

No one even bothered looking at Steve during this demeaning and heartless conversation, though she memorized whose faces looked particularly disappointed by the news of her infertility. The idea of being used for breeding like a farm animal was abhorrent. She would castrate the first man who tried.

A tired and unhappy-looking Senator near the front of the table rubbed his hand over his hair and knocked on the table. “Going back to Stark’s Captain America idea, what if we don’t tell anyone Rogers is a girl at all? Almost no one knew we even had a female in the trial stage. She’s mannish enough to pass for male and we don’t need the Krauts and Japs knowing how badly the project has failed. Let’s throw Rogers at the bond circuit—a strapping miracle of science for the kids and donors to _ooh_ and _ah_ over—and focus our energy on more important things. At least she can be useful to the war effort in that way, a way that leaves Rogers some dignity and pride.” It didn’t take much more discussion for everyone to agree to this plan.

And so the myth of Captain America was born, the male super soldier with artificially enhanced senses that never zoned thanks to science.

 

* * *

 

Several months later, Captain America was performing a show in Italy when word came down that Bucky’s unit, the unit Steve’s father had once served in, had gone MIA nearby. The brass declared it too dangerous and costly to mount a rescue. There was nothing for it but for Steve to go and rescue Bucky herself.

Peggy greased the way for Steve, proving once again what a swell dame she was. There didn’t seem to be anything Peggy Carter couldn’t do. Howard Stark proved surprisingly easy to persuade to help, giving Steve weapons and transportation, though his in-flight flirtation with Peggy over “fondue” made Steve’s stomach twist.

Even though she’d never done anything like this before, Steve was confident she would find Bucky. He’d never been able to hide from her before. She didn’t think this time would be different. Whether at a crowded dockyard or bustling dance hall, Steve knew him by the way he moved, the smell of his skin, and the tenor of his voice, and all of that before the serum enhanced her senses. This should be easy.

It's not.

After having to run for her life from a huge white wolf that seemed more ghost than animal, Steve finally stumbled upon the place where they were holding Bucky. Ignoring the odds, she snuck in, rescued his unit, and freed him from experimentation in Dr. Zola’s private lab. Although he won’t talk about it, Steve knows bad things happened to Bucky as a POW, but at least he’s alive and they’re together again. The brass even let “Captain America” stay in the fight and give her a team to lead, which includes Bucky as her Sergeant. For a little while, Steve feels pride in what Captain America is doing and hope for the future, even if no one on the front but Bucky, Peggy, and Colonel Phillips even know that Steve’s a woman. If Steve has to be seen as a man to do what needs doing, then Steve will be a man and that’s that. War is harder than Steve expected, but at the same time she feels more alive than she’s ever been before.

However, something is still missing.

Even though Bucky accepts Steve as the new and improved Captain America, no mystical Sentinel bonding occurs. She can feel that he’s her One, but he doesn’t say anything. Impatient, Steve finally confides in Bucky about her new Sentinel status one night, though not her hope to get confirmation from him that it’s real and to actually bond with him this time. She has too much pride to beg like that, even from Bucky… maybe especially from Bucky, who’s already given her so much through the years.

It is strange to be the forward one for once. She never realized how much courage it took for Bucky to bare his heart to her until she was forced to do the same. Steve more than half expects that Bucky changed his mind and just doesn’t want her anymore. Perhaps she took his teasing too seriously. Alternatively, he might look at her with pity and tell Steve that her gifts really are fake, that a real Guide like him can’t bond with anyone but a real Sentinel. Life has rarely treated her kindly. Steve tries to brace herself for the worst.

However, she didn’t expect Bucky’s loud, bitter laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Steve snapped. There was little in this life she resented more than being laughed at.

“The irony,” Bucky wheezed, subsiding into chuckles as he hunched over and hid his face in his hands.

Pursing her lips, Steve breathed in hard through her nose. “I don’t get it.”

Dragging his hands roughly through his hair, Bucky locked his hands behind his neck. “Ah, Stevie, you see, I’m not a latent Guide anymore. I’m not even sensitive. Zola’s torture and drugs turned my Guide gifts dormant, probably destroyed them forever, and just when you’re finally Online. What a joke, am I right?” Face turned away, though Steve could smell the tang of his tears on the air, Bucky yanked out his cigarette pack and shoved his fingers inside, crumpling it in his fist when he found it empty. “I gotta go cage a cig from somebody. Catch you later.” Turning on his heel, he rapidly disappeared into the night.

Rubbing at her burning eyes, Steve dropped her chin and marched off in the opposite direction.

_If Steve were a real Sentinel, shouldn’t she be able to heal Bucky’s Guide gifts?_

In the middle of a fight, Bucky falls from a speeding train and is lost, presumed dead. Enhanced senses are useless when what she needs is the ability to fly.

_If Steve were a real Sentinel, shouldn’t she have been able to save Bucky?_

Something in Steve’s spirit breaks with the loss of Bucky. A part of her dies. She realizes that Dr. Ingram was right; she really is just a fake Sentinel. Captain America, male war hero of the newsreels, is also powerless and fake.

The only thing real is the fight.

Stevie knows how to fight, how to get up again and again no matter how many times the blows knock you down.

At the eleventh hour, she stops Johann Schmidt, the dangerous man in charge of Hydra and recipient of Dr. Erskine’s first serum. As she crashes a plane full of powerful explosives safely into the ocean on what turned into a suicide mission, she comforted herself with the thought that no matter how fake everything was, she still made a real difference. The things she protected were important and real. Giving up her life to save so many innocent lives—to give all the other little Stevies and Buckys out there a chance to grow up and seek out their dreams—that’s not so bad a legacy for a poor and sickly Irish immigrant’s kid from Brooklyn.  

Stevie gave this life her best shot. Now she can stop fighting and give herself to death. On the other side, Bucky and her Ma and Pa are waiting for her. She can finally be her true self there, maybe wear a pretty, flowing white dress to match her golden trumpet, flaming sword, and muscular wings. She thinks she’ll like the angelic gig. As the plane crashes hard and everything turns to ice, Stevie lets her eyes fall shut and looks forward to resting in peace.


	4. Chapter 4

Approximately 75 years later, Steve found herself fighting lizard-skinned unicorns in New York City.

If anyone cared to ask, this was not the future she’d always dreamed of.

Explorers had found Steve’s frozen body in the Arctic Ocean, still alive because of Erskine’s miracle serum. SHIELD had quickly taken over, desperate for the heroic Captain America: the star-spangled man with a plan, the famous super soldier with artificially enhanced senses that never zoned thanks to science. No one wanted Stevie. They said being female distracted from the legend and diluted its power.

SHIELD solved that problem the usual way: by hiding it. They played on Steve’s sense of duty and honor to get her to continue the male hero façade. The future hadn’t changed that much. Only Fury and a small medical team ever knew the truth. Even though Steve could see through their manipulations, it didn’t mean they didn’t work. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had any better options after waking up alone in the twenty-first century.

In the future, there were Sentinels and Guides everywhere. During Steve’s orientation to modern history, she’d learned that there had been a mysterious resurgence in the Gifted population about fifteen years ago after over a century of scarcity. In that environment, Steve hadn’t expected her gender to stay secret for long. She even had two Sentinels on her Avengers team, though they were both partials, meaning less than all five senses enhanced. Still, Hawkeye and Black Widow were both elite SHIELD spies at the top echelon of a spy agency. Black Widow, missing only enhanced sight, was even a rare female Sentinel, something Steve had been shocked to discover in the current time period. Growing up, she’d been taught that female Sentinels only existed in myth or through science experiments like Dr. Erskine’s.

Steve braced herself for awkward questions and waited… and waited… and waited.

When none of the Avengers figured her out, Steve blamed it on the distraction of meeting in the midst of an alien invasion. At SHIELD, she assumed it was because they kept her relatively isolated. However, no one anywhere ever seemed to figure it out. Sure, Steve had spent most of her life dressing as a male at this point, but surrounded by real Sentinels and spies, she should’ve been exposed. Part of her wanted to be exposed. At least then there’d be one less thing to feel like an imposter about.

Steve finally started calling it the Captain America effect. In the seventy years she’d been gone, Captain America had become a larger than life figure with comics and trading cards and movies starring unrealistically handsome leading men. People equated Captain America with wholesomeness and always doing the right thing. They believed in Captain America’s legend more than they trusted their own senses, even when they should know better, even the ones who took a severe dislike to Steve. No one bothered looking past the legend and the shield. People saw what they expected to see.

It felt like the world had gone mad, but there was nothing Steve could do about it. Lost in this new world of the future, Steve tried to live up to the best of their expectations and ignore the worst. She didn’t have the right to be depressed. There were worse fates than being a male superhero fighting to protect the little guy from crazy supervillains. She’d always hated bullies and fighting was a familiar way of life. Eventually, Steve managed to find a kind of contentment leading the Avengers.

Life became routine.

Then the Winter Soldier showed up.

Steve’s senses went haywire. He punched her in the face and bloodied her lip, mussing her carefully gelled hair in a knock-down, drag-out fight. She felt more alive than she had since rappelling down a zipline onto a speeding train. And when the Winter Soldier’s mask and goggles broke off, revealing a dimpled chin and blue eyes that had never stopped haunting her dreams, Steve realized that the Winter Soldier was a brainwashed and super serumed Bucky Barnes.

Steve’s contentment went up in flames.

For the next six months, Steve bounced exhaustingly between chasing Bucky all over the world and dropping everything to fight the latest emergency with the Avengers. She wanted to shake the idiot Stevie of the past for ever taking Bucky’s presence for granted. Knowing he was out there alone and hurting, yet unable to trust in Stevie to help, it felt like the constant throb of a dying tooth. She hurt, yet she knew he must be hurting worse after the things they’d done to him.

Nevertheless, no matter how much she begged or cajoled, Bucky stubbornly refused to stop running from Steve, “to be taken care of like a stray dog…. You did like stray dogs before, didn’t you? Am I remembering that right?” he asked hesitantly, a tentative sign of trust.

“Yeah, Buck, especially the spotted ones with the round ears. You remember those?” Steve answered with her heart in her throat.

“...Not the dogs, just a snippet of a small you talking about them.” Looking away, Bucky casually swung his foot back and forth over the hundred foot drop on the other side of the ravine. A broken bridge separated them, brought down by a fight with a Hydra squad sent to reacquire the Asset. Their bodies lay broken far below at the bottom of the ravine. Neither Steve nor Bucky spared them any attention.

Bucky sat on the jut of a metal beam hanging out into thin air. His metal fingers played with a steel wire secured to the rocky plateau, the only thing keeping Steve from hyperventilating over his safety. The chance to talk with him only barely outweighed her fear of him falling. Unfortunately, if she freaked out about it, he’d probably jump off the edge just to prove he could easily survive it. Her heart wasn’t up to the trauma.

Steve had made sure to shout to be heard, not knowing how sensitive his version of the serum had made his hearing, but Bucky must’ve remembered her fake Sentinel status, that or he was being difficult just to try her patience, because he didn’t bother talking louder than normal.

“Back then, you probably got along better with dogs than people, am I right?” he teased with a sly smile that rocked her world.

“Well, you were my best friend. What does that say about you?” Steve mocked back automatically. She’d missed bantering with him. She’d missed her best friend.

The steep ravine was just a tad too wide to jump, even for a super soldier. She’d been tempted to try anyway, but Bucky had seen her intention and glared fiercely (along with threatening to shoot out her kneecaps) until Steve had promised not to. Sam and his falcon wings were currently helping Nat out in South Africa, and Tony and Thor rarely had time to help track down whispers of the Winter Soldier, so Steve had no air support.

At least the enforced separation gave Bucky the confidence to stop and chat. It had been months since the last time they’d exchanged more than a few words in passing. Steve took the opportunity to turn up all of her enhanced senses and soak this new Bucky in.

In addition to the metal arm whose plates had somehow morphed from matte into shiny as soon as they’d sat down to talk, this Bucky was both taller and bulkier than the man she’d once known. Slabs of muscle sheathed his thicker frame but didn’t detract from his flexibility or quickness. He’d kept his chestnut hair long, pulling it back into a tight herringbone braid secured top and bottom with an elastic. The black leather outfit covered in straps and buckles advertised the dangerous nature of the competent yet complex man wearing it. Where once he’d had a charming and inoffensive air, he now angled his body in a way both evocative and insolent. The Winter Soldier not only looked different from the old Bucky, he also smelled different, earthier in a way that had changed from comforting to challenging.

It all called to primitive instincts that made Steve want to hold him down and bite. Why was anyone’s guess. She’d certainly never had the urge to bite anyone before now.

In contrast, just hearing the timber of his voice made muscles in Steve’s lower back relax in ways they hadn’t done in recent memory. She wanted to wrap herself around his body and hide away from the world, wanted to secret him away and sleep for a hundred years of rest and rejuvenation. Her fingertips throbbed with the need to relearn the texture of his skin, but she curled them into fists and reminded herself not to be too greedy.

In response to her teasing, a hollow smile formed on Bucky’s lips. He shook his head and spoke slowly, as if trying to teach a lesson to a struggling student. “That’s the problem, Steve. I’m not the best friend you remember. I don’t have those memories anymore. I’m the Winter Soldier: an obedient dog who kills on command and then returns to his cage, or at least I was for a very long time. I need to figure out how to be a real human again, or at least a wolf instead of a dog. Either way, I can’t do that if I have to keep dodging you and your friends on top of Hydra’s squads.”

“Why not?” Steve jutted out her chin. “I’m not just giving up and forgetting about you, Bucky. Don’t ask that of me.” Muscles up and down her body clenched hard. She might have to try and make that jump after all. She refused to lose him again.

“Stubborn punk,” he muttered. Looking at how she was gathering herself to jump, Bucky pursed his lips instead of reaching for his gun to shoot out her kneecaps as promised. He rubbed his fingertips over his mouth thoughtfully. “How about a compromise?” he asked slowly with a charming tilt of his head, reminiscent of his old self, but with harder eyes.

Nevertheless, it was close enough to arrest the rising tension in Steve’s legs. Besides, Bucky’s unfairly long and pretty eyelashes were still the same, along with the involuntary jump in Stevie’s pulse when he turned on the charm. “I’m listening,” she said, willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Willing to give him almost anything.

Months later, Steve still wondered if she’d been right in giving in to Bucky’s demands to stop chasing him, but at least he seemed happier now, even if she mostly wasn’t.

However, the middle of a fight against lizard-skinned unicorns wasn’t the best time to be thinking about her problems with Bucky. If Steve didn’t get her head in the game, she was going to get gored by one of the attacking unicorns. The other Avengers would never let Captain America live that one down. The jokes would practically write themselves.

Speaking of which, Tony chose that moment to ask through the com, “So Cap, I thought virgins were supposed to have a special bond with unicorns. Where did it all go wrong for you?” Steve used her shield to bash in the head of the scaled unicorn trying to trample a street performer with long dreads spray-painted to look like a statue. The silver man shouted his thanks and ran off towards the police barricade in the distance.

“Maybe they’re too distracted by how red and shiny you are. They probably think you’re an apple and want a bite.” Steve said, throwing a parked motorcycle at two unicorns charging down the street.

Not to be outdone, Iron Man blasted a car, sending it flipping end over end to flatten a group of three. “That would explain all the tooth marks on my legs. I’m just too lovable. Pepper complains about that all the time.”

Hawkeye snorted and shot several exploding nets in front of the next intersection, blocking it off so the approaching unicorns couldn’t escape that way. “I’ve always wondered, does Steve ever try to pick up girls in bars by introducing himself as,” Clint dropped his voice, “Captain Steven Rogers: the star-spangled man with a plan?”

As the rest of the team cracked up over the com, Steve rolled her eyes so hard it hurt. “No.”

“If I was you, Steve, I’d lead with the whole, having enhanced senses like a full Sentinel, but not needing a Guide. Chicks love the idea of sex with a Sentinel, even a partial Sentinel like me, but think we won’t fully commit because we’d dump them if we found the right Guide.” Clint said.

Steve tensed, waiting for a cutting remark from Natasha, Clint’s serial ex-girlfriend, but her com stayed silent. She was probably too distracted. That or she’d get her revenge later.

“Are you saying you wouldn’t?” Tony asked curiously, not catching the possible undercurrents to the conversation.

Clint hummed. “Depends on the Guide and the girlfriend, but that’s beside the point. I’m trying to help Cap get a date. The man, the myth, the legend needs to learn how to relax. He’s too uptight.”

“True,” Tony agreed. “For a while there he had fire in his eyes. I thought he’d started really living, but ever since Barnes forced Steve to stop chasing him around and settle for postcards and phone calls, Steve’s gone morose. He barely even smiles at sloth videos.”

Natasha chose that moment to chime in. “My section’s now cleared, moving into support for Hulk. As for Steve, I’ve tried setting him up on dates, but it never goes anywhere,” she groused. “He’s not trying hard enough.”

Steve straightened her back. “Hey, I show up, but those ladies see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, no matter what words actually pass my lips. I’m not interested in being a notch on someone’s bedpost or a salacious meme on social media.”

Tony gasped in shock. “Be still the arc reactor guarding my heart, Cap referenced memes and social media! Maybe he’s finally ready for Tinder and Twitter.”

“I’m assuming those aren’t things to light a bird on fire,” Steve said wryly. Glancing down the street, she saw a dust cloud. Steve used her Sentinel sight to see a herd of Unicorns stampeding their way. “Iron Man, try to turn the unicorn herd away from the civilians behind the cars,” Steve ordered.

“Roger that,” Iron Man said, shooting off his hand repulsors to try and turn the herd. “See what I did there? Roger that, Rogers?” Unfortunately, the repulsors didn’t frighten the unicorns. They barely swerved.

Hawkeye, perched on top of a nearby building, groaned and shot off several arrows into the leaders of the pack. “So lame, Stark, not to mention you’ve used that one before.”

“I have not,” Tony defended hotly. “Jarvis?”

“Sir, your humor is as bad as your memory. Hawkeye is correct, in that you used that joke on Captain America last April. Also the following July,” Jarvis, Tony’s AI, said in his snooty British accent.

The genetically engineered unicorns had already proven that they could tear through metal dumpsters like they were made of gingerbread. Steve didn’t have much confidence in the cars providing any protection to civilians. “Where’s Hulk?” Steve asked. “Can he disrupt the stampede?”

“Negative,” Nat answered, sounding slightly out of breath. “The mad scientist launched one last attack before getting away in a submersible. We took care of the attack, but now Hulk’s offended and too busy sulking. He’s out of the fight for now.”

Steve frowned at the strained sound of her voice. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m insulted,” Widow snapped back, hiding the previous vulnerability. “I’ll make my way back towards you.”

Rolling her eyes, Steve bashed a passing unicorn in the face with her shield, knocking it out cold, and tried to think of a better plan. The Avengers were taking down unicorns as fast as they could, but there were just too many of them moving too fast.

“Cap, you’re old. Shouldn’t you know how to herd horses?” Tony asked.

“I’m a poor city kid from Brooklyn. What do you think?” Steve tipped back her head and looked around. “Anyone have eyes on Thor since his com shorted out again?”

Annoyed, Nat snapped, “I thought you had finally fixed the com problem, Stark.”

“I’m going to try something to turn the herd. Be right back,” Tony snapped right back. “Try not to miss me too much.”

“Northeast corner. I’ll get Thor’s attention,” Hawkeye said confidently.

Steve couldn’t see Thor, but despite being only a partial Sentinel, Hawkeye had arguably the best eyesight in the world. Steve trusted Clint’s eyes over her own. Unfortunately, Clint also had bad impulse control and no self-preservation. Without a word of warning, he threw himself off the building into midair and shot an arrow at the distant Thor.

Steve’s heart jumped into her throat. She was too far away to do anything.

“ _Мудак_!” Nat spat as Clint’s body sped towards the ground in a freefall.

Hawkeye slung his bow over his back and did a triple flip, bounced off the edge of a fire escape, grabbed a set of electrical wires, which snapped under his weight, swung in an arc across the street, and almost slammed into another building before dropping the wires to fall fifteen feet down to land on top of a crane arm, which he proceeded to slide down like an Olympic snowboarder. Leaping off at the last moment, he rolled several times before bounding to his feet, breathing like a freight train. “Hah!” he wheezed.

Seconds later, Thor flew down in front of the charging unicorn herd with his hammer whirling, breaking necks with every swing and turning the leading edge into a wall of meat. Bones snapped with sharp crunches. The next row of unicorns met the same fate. Their charge faltered, and without new orders from the mad scientist who’d created them, the unicorns began milling around aimlessly in exhausted circles. The police moved in once the Avengers had contained the problem and quickly finished mopping up.

Stowing her shield on her back, Steve frowned at where Hawkeye had sat down on a bench to gingerly flex his ankles. “Do you need medical, Hawkeye?”

Clint immediately jumped to his feet and waved his arms. “Nah, I’m fine,” he deflected, not noticing Natasha storming up on his six. The minute she got into range, she kicked him in the back of the knee, sending him crashing to the ground with a yelp.

“ _Мудак_ ,” she glared fiercely at him. No one in the world seemed to evoke more emotion in the Black Widow than Clint Barton.

Face going sullen, Clint stood up and brushed off his knees. “Don’t be such a brat.”

Steve winced and took a careful step back.

Natasha’s face went cold and hard. “Are you trying to kill yourself? You never would’ve pulled that stunt if Coulson were here.”

“Well he’s not, is he?” Clint snapped back, his voice sounding almost brittle. “I did my job. You’re not my handler or my girlfriend, not anymore, so back off.”

Their most recent breakup had been very awkward.

Supposedly, this had been the third and longest time they’d tried to date, but they still couldn’t quite make it stick. Tony claimed it was because they were both attractive Sentinels with roving eyes and too much baggage. Bruce said they couldn’t help it if their Sentinel biology made them also crave a bond with a Guide, something the other person couldn’t provide. Both of them being partial Sentinels just made it more awkward, he claimed. The concept wasn’t impossible—Stark Industries had a happily married Sentinel pair working in R&D and several married Guides and partials in Marketing—but all of those individuals had relatively uneventful histories and low-level Gifts. Clint and Nat were partials, but almost off the charts when it came to their talents.

Nobody talked much about how the Gifted really worked, especially to a fake like Steve, but from what she could gather, real Sentinels, even partial ones, had an aching spiritual void that only a bond with a Guide could fill and not all bonds were equally strong. Since she was only a fake Sentinel, Steve assumed the pain she felt about Bucky’s absence had to be based solely on their history together and not something metaphysical. The thought of having to put up with the ache of missing someone you’d never even met, an ache that hurt even worse (though she felt skeptical about that), made her determined to not be judgmental and take sides even though Nat was one of her best friends and Clint’s private life seemed crazier than a comic strip in the funny pages.

Tony landed and retracted his faceplate. “What’s a _mudak_?” He asked into the awkward silence.

Turning on his heel, Clint stalked off. He had a hitch in his gait, but not enough to warrant Steve forcing him to stop and get professional treatment. She’d have to trust that Clint would get himself looked at if the injury were serious. Hopefully his professionalism in staying fit for the job would outweigh his pride.

Natasha had turned off her emotions completely, leaving her face as smooth as a porcelain doll except for the subtle flaring of her nostrils from where she kept track of Clint’s rapidly diminishing form by triangulating her Sentinel hearing with her sense of smell. “A _mудак_ is a birdbrain, a moron, an assh—”

“That’s enough, Widow. We get the point,” Steve cut her off wearily, not wanting Tony to start parroting her Russian insults in battle. He already had enough unprofessional material to last a lifetime.

They were all tired and covered in scales and unicorn guts. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. “I want a salad, a really big one with lots of raw veggies,” Steve announced.

“Did killing all those unicorns release Cap’s inner princess and turn him into a vegetarian?” Tony asked with exaggerated horror, placing a metal-gauntleted hand on his forehead as if he might faint.

Thor sent Steve a judgmental frown. He really liked meat.

Steve scratched the back of her head. “Not exactly….” They started walking away from the fight zone. Bruce, no longer the Hulk, appeared from around the corner with a tired wave and quietly joined the group as they exited the police barricade.

Natasha gave Bruce a welcoming nod and turned back to Steve. “Then what’s with the salad?” She never could resist a secret.

Blushing, Steve admitted, “Not to be indelicate—”

“Since when has anyone in this group been delicate?” Tony asked incredulously.

“—but the crunching sound of Thor breaking the herd’s charge made me think of carrots and croutons, and I’m always hungry after a fight, so... _salad_ ,” Steve explained with a shrug.

“Dear Captain!” Thor cried joyfully. “I am honored to have inspired such a craving! I do believe that Lady Darcy introduced me to a salad buffet just a few blocks from here. Let us descend on them like a plague of locusts and empty their larders!” Throwing his massive arms around Steve and Natasha’s shoulders, and locking his fingers around Tony’s and Bruce’s wrists, Thor enthusiastically dragged the Avengers off for salad.


	5. Chapter 5

 

Instead of getting to enjoy a crunchy salad buffet with her team, Steve got accosted by Agent Higginson of the FBI, agency appointed liaison to the Avengers. The self-important Higginson demanded an immediate and detailed accounting of the battle for his superiors. Bitterly resigned, Steve waved the rest of the team on and stopped to deal with him. If she didn’t, the unpleasant Higginson would follow them all the way to the team dinner. Times like these made Steve really miss having a SHIELD handler, especially when she had to explain how the mad scientist escaped from her team.

Agent Higginson, a man displaced at the height of his FBI career by the reappearance of the Gifted, bitterly disapproved of the special treatment enjoyed by the Avengers in particular and the Sentinel population in general. He went out of his way to wear Sentinel-unfriendly products and then insist on questioning the Sentinel members of the Avengers. The cologne Higginson wore was so strong, it made Steve feel like her nostrils and skin were perforated by chili peppers. Clint’s eyes turned bloodshot and leakier than an old hose while Natasha’s skin went blotchy and her breathing wheezy.

Steve had tried protesting, only to be told that a fake Sentinel and two partials had to be overreacting. Tony wanted to get the man fired, but Higginson was only a year away from retirement and had a wife and elderly father to support. Instead, Steve eagerly counted the days until Higginson’s retirement and did her best to protect the rest of the team from his company.

By the time she’d finished updating Higginson and rejoined the team, Steve had a roaring headache and the crawling skin feeling of her serum fighting down a rash. Inside the restaurant, the team had decimated most of the salad bar. They’d saved Steve some carrots and croutons, but all of the tomatoes, kidney beans, and most of the other toppings were gone. The only salad dressing left was fat free Italian. It left Steve in a foul mood.

Almost two weeks of peace had passed since the unicorn battle and Steve’s spirits had stayed dark. She stared morosely at the brick wall outside her bedroom window, bored, bitter, and unable to sleep. Sitting on her bed in the dark, she tried to lose herself in counting the sand grains embedding in each brick. It was the hour of the wolf, that time between darkest night and the gleam of dawn, when bad things leaned close and taunted you with your deepest fears and regrets.

Some nights, when the specters loomed too near, Steve purposely zoned one of her senses by focusing too hard, even though that was supposed to be impossible since she was a fake. She rarely stayed lost for longer than half an hour, but by cycling through each sense, she could hasten the dawn. However, she didn’t dare do it too often because her teammates sometimes called her randomly in the middle of the night and she didn’t want to be too zoned out to notice and help.

A passing car’s headlights hit the brick and scintillated off the crystalline sand, each glint like a burning noonday sun to Steve’s eyes. She flinched away so hard she almost fell off the bed. Her eyes watered. Afterwards, it took her several minutes to get the level on her eyes right again, with both the brightness and focus of objects where they should be.

_Did real Sentinels have this much trouble?_

She’d thought about trying to find an open-minded Guide to see if was even possible for a fake Sentinel to form a surface bond. Real Sentinels said that even weak bonds could make a huge difference in control. Steve wanted better control, wanted help with the problems she had with her senses jumping from too sensitive to too muted or the way it sometimes felt like her skin was crawling with fire ants, but that would require admitting out loud that she was having problems and needed help just being a Sentinel, even a fake one.

That was a stumbling block, since Steve made a habit of not talking about her problems. Luckily she never had sensory problems while fighting, probably because battle was the one place she felt completely at home, so she wasn’t risking anyone but herself by procrastinating dealing with the issue. Protecting others was the important thing. Protecting herself? Not so much.

From her new position sprawled across the bed, Steve looked at the only decorations in her entire apartment. She let her eyes wander across them, since it was too much effort to get up. In front of an 18th century Gobelins tapestry sat a shelf holding a snakeskin baseball glove, a shark keychain with a pair of legs sticking out of its mouth, an elaborately painted eggshell, a cat waving its paw for good luck, a tin can of Dulce de Leche, and a blue aluminum bottle of Grapefruit Gokuri.

Each item had appeared randomly over the last few months, sometimes in her mailbox covered in stamps and other times stealthily slipped into her jacket pocket in a crowd or left in the motorcycle helmet hanging from her bike. Bucky never delivered the gifts himself, his scent wasn’t fresh enough for that, but her Sentinel senses confirmed that he’d handled them all at some point because they all bore oil from his skin and faint smudges of fingerprints or the faintest indentation of his metal finger plates. When pressed, he’d finally admitted to bargaining with some people to make the deliveries. When pressed harder, he admitted to sending Steve the gifts so she shared in his quest to discover himself and reasons not to burn the world to the ground.

Steve had smiled about that for a solid week.

The Dulce de Leche, some kind of milk caramel, had tasted so amazing, Steve had devoured the entire can using only her fingers. The Grapefruit Gokuri, on the other hand, was sweetened grapefruit juice with bits of pulp floating in it that stuck to her teeth unpleasantly. Unable to just waste it, Steve had plugged her nose, gulped it down, and then brushed her teeth rigorously. After washing the Dulce de Leche can and Gokuri bottle, she’d added them to her shelf of knickknacks. If she couldn’t have Bucky with her, at least she could have these reminders that she hadn’t been completely abandoned. Sometimes it helped.

Sometimes it didn’t.

Turning her head listlessly, Steve saw her face reflected in the window. A stranger stared back. Steve missed too many things and too many people, even herself. She’d been missing so long she didn’t remember who Steve was anymore.

Even after almost five years, the 21st Century didn’t feel like home. Walking down the street, none of the reflections in the windows looked right. Time had changed the buildings, the quality of light, the smell of the air, and the taste of food. Steve had changed too, but nobody was around to notice or care.

The only thing that hadn't changed was the stray dogs. Her favorite spotted dog breed had miraculously survived seventy-five years in the back alleys of Brooklyn. Steve had only seen one of the dogs, but when the time between Avengers fights stretched too long and her heartbeat turned sluggish, the recurring sightings of that particular spotted dog were sometimes the only thing keeping her from drowning in despair.

Unlike Steve, the other Avengers had friends and family to fill their time. They had hobbies besides fighting. They knew how to keep busy. Tony kept pressing Steve to move back into Avengers tower, but Steve had tried that and it hadn’t gone well. Plus she was worried Bucky wouldn’t be comfortable there (though Steve had always been the one who didn’t fit in, not Bucky). Steve refused to live anywhere Bucky wouldn’t.

If Bucky ever decided to live with Steve again, that is, or even visit.

Steve was desperately, miserably lonely. She’d never spent more than a few weeks living on her own in her entire life before waking up in the future. At first she’d hoped that Avengers tower would fill that ache, but she’d found that living there made her loneliness worse. The other Avengers kept odd hours and liked their solitude. When Tony or Bruce got lost in science, they could disappear for days. Thor flitted mostly between his Lady Jane and Asgard, and Natasha and Clint skulked about for the fun and practice, sometimes disappearing for jobs or to meet with shady contacts without warning. Team practices felt great, but once the fighting stopped, Steve had spent too many nights hanging around the echoing public areas alone while the rest of the team sought out their own amusements.

Hoping to find friends around and being repeatedly disappointed hurt worse than just expecting to always be alone. Steve had moved out after six months. It took Tony two months to surface from his latest engineering obsession to notice, but then he pitched a fit about it for twice as long to make up for that, and still brought up Steve moving back in periodically, which was both annoying and flattering.

When Steve’s chasing after Bucky had ended abruptly last winter, Natasha had seriously suggested Steve move back in. She’d said it was different and better now, but Steve was afraid to trust in that. Unmet expectations had always been a primary source of unhappiness in Steve’s life.

The others didn’t seem to have any problem finding other work and relationships to fill their time. Avengers work was important, but haphazard. As for Sam, he was a great friend, but Steve couldn’t let herself rely on Sam too much. They texted and called, but they lived in different cities now and Sam had other things pulling at his time, like his family, a girlfriend, and a steady job. Steve didn’t want to drag Sam down.

In trying to help Steve out, both Sam and Natasha tried to set Steve up on dates, but time had not made Steve less awkward. She had no luck with love. Even though Steve was considered attractive now by both women and men, she had trouble feeling romantic feelings about anyone actually available. The majority of the population just didn’t do it for her. It seemed she was doomed to pine forever over charmingly competent people out of her league and uninterested in Steve as a person.

Only in her dreams would Steve ever have Bucky as a comrade in arms, best friend, _and_ lover. Right now, she couldn’t even manage one of those. Every fiber of her being thrummed with the need to be with Bucky, to support him the way he’d always supported her, to finally stop hiding behind her pride and honestly show him all the ways in which she loved him. Being separated felt intrinsically wrong. It throbbed like a missing rib. Steve was willing to take as much or as little as Bucky was willing to give her as long as they could just be together.

But Bucky didn’t want to be together right now. That day on the broken bridge, he’d told Steve that he needed to try being himself on his own after so long molding himself to another’s expectations, that he needed to know if there was anything left once he stopped acting like a mirror. _How could Steve say no when he explained it like that? When he turned on the charm to get his way?_

Steve couldn’t.

Bucky had promised to keep in touch to stop her worrying ( _Hah!_ ) and disappeared again. He’d kept his promise by writing her letters, sending gifts, and occasionally calling, but there were certain things Steve couldn’t say over the phone.

She couldn't tell Bucky that she felt like dying sometimes, that all the masks were suffocating her, that she didn't know how to say this to her friends because if it went wrong, she could lose the Avengers and end up even more lonely and miserable than she was now, she could end up without a purpose, and she couldn't bring herself to risk it. Life could always get worse, especially when death wasn’t on option. Bucky didn't need Steve dragging him down with her problems.

Steve tried not to resent that, tried not to bleed too obviously when Bucky didn’t seem to be missing Steve as much as Steve missed Bucky, tried not to resent that Bucky didn’t remember everything about Steve like Steve remembered about Bucky, or that he was changing out there in innumerable ways she didn’t get to experience or see.

Steve tried to be grateful for what she had. Better to be the plastic action figure of Sentinel Captain America, taken out of the box regularly to fight evil in the 21st Century with an amazing team of heroes before going back onto the shelf to collect dust, than just a powerless and sickly nobody who died early and unremarked. At least she had the fight and she had her health.

Rolling to her feet, Steve picked up the cat statue Bucky had sent her and held the paw beneath her nose, dialing up her sense of smell. At some point Bucky must’ve shaken the cat’s hand, because it still bore the faintest scent of his skin. Steve inhaled, soothed and centered.

Outside her front door, a phone abruptly rang in the hallway. It trilled incessantly, over and over, without only the slightest pause before starting up again. However, she didn’t sense anyone in the hallway. Ephemeral peace lost, Steve growled. Pulling a robe on over her pajamas, she belted it, stomped to the door, and yanked open the locks.

The hall was empty as expected. A flip phone sat on her welcome mat with a red, white, and blue glossy bow attached. Steve had seen a similar bow at the Dollar Store just last week (Steve mainly shopped at Dollar Stores because the prices in normal stores made her sick). Examining the phone with her Sentinel senses, Steve didn’t detect anything unexpected. The phone didn’t smell like explosives, drugs, or, unfortunately, Bucky. Part of Steve shamelessly hoped it came from a new supervillain. She hadn’t punched someone in way too long.

Steve picked the phone up and took it inside her apartment. Not bothering to lock the door in case someone decided to ambush her and give her a bit of excitement, Steve took off the bow and dropped it on the table to save for reuse. Letting the phone ring one more time, she flipped it open like she’d been taught and held it up to her ear. “Hello? This is Captain Steve Rogers speaking.”

“Finally! I was about to die of old age, waiting for you to pick up the phone,” Bucky’s familiar Brooklyn drawl complained.

Relaxing back against the wall, Steve smiled. Everything felt brighter. “Do you know what time it is here? And maybe I’d answer quicker if you called my regular phone like a normal person instead of depositing a new one on my doormat like a cat with a dead bird.”

Bucky chuckled. “Well there’s your problem. Neither of us are what you’d call a normal person.”

“Point,” Steve conceded.

“Did you get the Grapefruit Gokuri I sent?” he asked with anticipation.

“Yeah… thank you,” Steve said politely.

Bucky laughed, a sound that sent pleasant chills up Steve’s back. “You hated it, didn’t you?”

Steve smiled ruefully and wrinkled her nose. “It wasn’t really to my taste.”

“Oh well, more for me,” he said easily.

“So what has you calling me so creatively?”

“Well,” Bucky said slowly, “I’ve been wondering something for a while now, and I just got back a new memory, a really early one of you getting in a fight on the playground, and I decided to just go ahead and finally ask about it....”

“Go on, Buck. You know you can ask me anything,” Steve encouraged.

She could hear Bucky’s bed springs squeaking as he shifted weight on the other side of the phone. “This may sound silly, but did you used to go by Stevie all the time?”

“Yes,” she answered slowly.

“And wear a checkered dress with poufy sleeves and a big square collar and your hair in ringlets?”

Steve’s throat went tight. She’d forgotten about that dress. Her Ma had sewn it. “Yeah.”

Taking a deep breath, Bucky asked, “So it wouldn’t sound too crazy if I asked you if you’re really a girl inside that starred monkey suit? Or did the serum somehow change your plumbing along with everything else?”

Face going hot and then cold, Steve slid down the wall to sit on the floor. “No, the serum only added to what was already latent inside of me. I’m still a girl through and through, just strong enough to make the people I punch stay down with one hit now.”

“Oooh,” Bucky breathed out thoughtfully. Steve held her breath. "Huh, I guess that explains it. I'm not really bi for you after all."

Pulling the phone away from her ear, Steve frowned at it in confusion before returning it to her ear. "You’re not really ‘ _buy_ ’ing what for me?"

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll sort it out the next time I see you in person,” Bucky said breezily.

Steve’s heart jumped. “Will that be soon? Are you coming to visit?”

“Not just yet, but it won’t be too much longer,” Bucky said apologetically.

Steve deflated, lifting her hand to rub against the painful ache in her chest.

Clearing his throat, Bucky asked, “So how did your team take the whole female Captain thing?”

Distracted, Steve frowned down at her knees. “They don’t know.”

“What do you mean they don’t know? That’s just dumb. Either you trust them to have your back or you don’t.”

"It would make them not trust me, after keeping it quiet for so long. Might break the team apart if I’m not there to be the leader and peacemaker. With the reformed SHIELD at a fraction of its old strength, I can't risk it. The world needs the Avengers. Standing up and protecting others is more important than my feelings.”

"No it ain't,” Bucky said decisively.

"I'll be fine, Buck. I always am. Don't worry about me. Just concentrate on you, huh?" Steve said in her Captain America voice. She found it easier that way.

"You stubborn punk, of course you'd say that, but fine, I’ll leave it alone for now as long as you’re okay."

Steve stayed silent, not wanting to lie to him, but Bucky either didn’t notice or didn’t call her on it. After a few moments of silence, the sound of Bucky’s tongue darting out to wet his lips was so clear she could picture it in her mind. “I have another question,” he said.

“Shoot,” Steve said with forced nonchalance, wondering what he’d drop on her next.

Voice light, he said, “You hated the Gokuri juice, but there’s no way you hated the Dulce de Leche. It’s creamy gold in a can. Am I right?”

Tension dropping from her shoulders, Steve nodded. “Yeah, I couldn’t even wait to get a spoon, it was that good.”

“I know, right?!” Bucky exclaimed.

Staying on the phone for hours, Steve lost herself in conversation until sunrise snuck in and painted the room in the pale light of dawn.


	6. Chapter 6

 

“Steve’s finally here for Team Night. Let’s go!” Clint hollered as he jumped off the counter in the communal kitchen. Natasha and Tony leisurely got up from the living room couch as Bruce drained the last of his tea and washed the mug.

“Thor still gone?” Steve asked, looking around. “It’s been months.”

“Yeah, he’s still in Australia, Asgard, wherever,” Tony flung out his hand in annoyance. “He should know by now that the best place to be is with the Avengers.”

“And the letter of the day, brought to us by Iron Man, is _A_ ,” Bruce said in a sing-song tone of voice. When everyone looked at him blankly, he sighed. “Sesame Street? Children’s show with Muppets?”

Tony sniffed. “I know it, I’m just thinking about how horrified people would be if I ended up on a kids show.” A wicked smirk tilted the side of his lips, revealing he was considering doing it for that exact reason.

“Born in 1918,” Steve explained simply.

“No TV in a circus tent.” Clint shrugged.

“Russian child assassin.” Nat gave them all cold face.

Bruce rolled his eyes and dried the mug. “You guys trot out those excuses all the time. Brighten up your adult lives and turn on PBS once in a while.”

“That’s the Public Broadcast Station on TV, for the ignorant in the room,” Tony said. “Jarvis, make sure everyone can find that on their TVs, will you?”

“Very good, Sir,” Jarvis said from the ceiling speakers. “Captain Rogers, Security has asked that you move your vehicle soon, as it is obstructing their sightlines in the parking garage and creating vulnerabilities.”

Steve herded her teammates into the elevator. “Thank you, Jarvis. Let’s go, Avengers. We don’t want to be late.”

“For what?” Natasha asked stepping into the elevator last. “You still haven’t told us what we’re doing.”

The doors closed and Steve pressed the button for the parking garage. “That’s because it’s a surprise.”

Leaning against the wall, Tony asked, “Is it swing dancing?” Steve shook her head. “Baseball?” Tony guessed.

“Nope, but that’s a good one for next time,” Steve pulled out her little notebook and jotted the idea down with her pencil stub.

Bruce groaned. “I don’t like baseball.”

“For your team night, you made us all go to hot yoga and a flute recital,” Clint griped, “you have _no_ room to talk.”

Crossing his arms defensively, Bruce frowned. “At least there weren’t creatures bursting out of people’s chests in a spray of bodily fluids. You made us watch all those Alien movies. I almost went green.”

“At least the green guy has good taste in movies,” Clint muttered. Unlike Bruce, the Hulk loved sports, horror, and action movies. Since Steve hadn’t really liked the yoga or the horror movies, she kept her mouth shut.

“The Alien franchise is a classic,” Nat said emphatically, “with—”

“Ha!” Tony cut his hands through the air. “The later Alien movies are garbage with weak plots and boring characters. Only the first one and the second with the space marines count.”

Clint was locked in a staring match with Bruce, a reckless action considering Bruce was the Hulk and they were in a small elevator. At Tony’s comment, Clint raised his hand for a high five without looking away from Bruce’s eyes. Tony immediately delivered.

High fives were serious business on this team.

Giving Tony a frown, Nat argued, “Ripley is awesome, irrespective of the weak plots surrounding her character. She’s one of the few representations of a strong female Sentinel in cinema. She uses her gifts to protect people and kill aliens, not just rescue lost puppies and stalk the cute Guide down the street.”

“But they still had her go Feral over Newt, the kid in Aliens,” Clint pointed out. “They always make female Sentinels go feral, even though it almost never happens in real life.”

“She never would’ve been able to kill the Alien Queen otherwise,” Tony argued as the elevator dinged and the doors opened into the parking garage. “And at least she survived and didn’t make the situation worse. Usually in the movies, Feral female Sentinels get all of their allies killed and then die tragically.”

Bruce snorted, a sound that startled Clint into blinking and losing the staring contest. Turning smugly away, Bruce pointed out, “Obviously the writers regretted that, since they killed off both the kid and the space marine at the start of the third one.”

“Which is why only the first and second movies count as classics,” Tony sing-songed.

“This way, guys,” Steve said, waving them to the left where she’d parked.

Tony took three steps out of the elevator and froze in his tracks. “What is _that_? I thought we were taking the limo.”

“It’s called a minivan,” Steve explained proudly. “Everyone can fit while facing the front and the seats all have cup holders.”

At Tony’s spasm of horror and offended dignity, Clint started howling with laughter. “T-Tony’s face!” he gasped. “A minivan! Steve’s gonna drive us around like-like a soccer mom on a sitcom!” He wrapped a hand around his middle and leaned against the wall, laughing loudly.

Putting on his sunglasses mechanically, Tony turned to Steve. “Tony Stark will not be seen out in public in a beige minivan.”

Ignoring him, the rest of the Avengers rushed forward. “I call shotgun!” Clint cried, but Nat kneecapped him before he could dive into the front seat. She slid inside, closing and locking the door smugly.

“You cheat!” Clint laughed, sprawled on the cement.

Suppressing a smile at their antics, Steve focused on Tony. “They didn’t have one in Iron Man red and the beige was cheapest. C’mon, Tony. It’s team night,” Steve coaxed.

Frowning, Tony rubbed the muscle twitching at his temple. “Fine, but I do this under protest.”

“Stop stalling, Stark, and get your billionaire butt in here,” Nat ordered through her open window.

Just as a resigned Tony finally began to sit down inside the minivan, Steve leaned in through the open door and said with an extra dose of earnestness, “The seats aren’t even that sticky.” Tony froze in his half-lowered position, looking horrified and nauseous.

Bruce put a hand over his mouth and snorted.

“Just kidding, they cleaned it to Sentinel standards it before I rented it.” Steve grinned cheekily and hopped into the driver’s seat.

Tony shot Steve a dirty look and carefully ran his hand over the upholstery in a check before sitting down. “I don’t even want to know how many people have used this car before us. _Ugh_.”

“Buckle up!” Steve said cheerfully and then gunned it out of the parking garage. The minivan didn’t have much get-up-and-go, groaning like a constipated dinosaur, but the amusing pain on Tony’s face at the engine’s unwieldy attempt made it worth the effort.

Forty-five minutes later, Steve drove the minivan up to the front gate of their destination. “Welcome to the drive-in movie theater,” Steve announced grandly, dropping her voice and using the intonation she’d learned on the bond circuit.

“Wow, I think you actually found something I haven’t done before,” Tony said, deadpan. Before Steve could feel too proud, Tony added, “There’s a reason for that. We could be way more comfortable watching the latest movie in my personal home theater or I could rent out an actual movie theater and get catering. Drive-ins are dilapidated dumps for poor people with seven kids and dating teenagers with open door policies at home.”

Parking the minivan, Steve ignored Tony’s complaints and reached into her pocket. She turned around in her seat and handed everyone a white envelope. “Here’s money for snacks. You have thirty minutes to get back before the first show starts. Have fun.”

“I like nachos and Red Vines,” Bruce said decisively, tucking the money into his pocket and sliding out of the vehicle.

Tony stared at the envelope in his hand in bewilderment and irritation. “Steve, I’m rich. You don’t have to give _me_ money for food. No one gives me money.”

Exchanging an amused look, Clint and Nat left the minivan silently.

Feeling fond, Steve reached back and patted Tony’s knee. “I’m the one who brought you here, so the treats are on me. Just because you can pay doesn’t mean you should always have to.” Steve gave him a cajoling smile, “So go on, go wild at the concession stand. Besides, they only take cash and I know you don’t carry bills small enough. Let me know if you need more.”

Tony opened his envelope. His lips quirked, “I might have to. What am I going to buy with only twenty-five bucks?”

“Then we can stand in line together, just in case you’re really hungry and need another five dollars.” Steve winked.

Raising his eyes to the sky, Tony sighed dramatically and got out of the minivan. “C’mon, Rogers. Let’s go buy some popcorn.”

When they got back to the minivan with their snacks, everyone else had already returned. Steve hadn’t even put down her food when Clint demanded, “Just what movies are we watching? There’re a lot of kids out there, Steve. A _lot_. I’m having circus flashbacks.”

Putting his x-large drink into the cup-holder, Steve answered reassuringly. “It’s a highly rated double feature: a Chinese historical drama and an African drama about royal succession. Sam recommended them.”

For some reason, Natasha’s lips pressed together in mirth at his answer. “Tell them the actual movie names, Steve.”

“ _Mulan_ and _The Lion King_ ,” Steve said, brow wrinkling. “Jarvis double-checked for me and said they both had very good reviews online.”

Kicking her legs up on the dash, Nat laughed at the groans from the back.

“What?” Steve asked defensively.

“Those’re cartoons for kids, Steve!” Tony griped.

Clint cheered, “I love Disney movies!”

“But Sam said…” Steve trailed off, realizing she’d been tricked.

“Oh look, the previews are starting,” Nat chuckled, turning up the volume on the radio.

The movies may have been aimed at children, but Steve found herself completely engrossed. The art looked amazing and Steve completely empathized with the main character. Mulan was a woman who, for the sake of honor, cut her hair and dressed up as a man to go to war. Just like Steve, Mulan didn’t fit in or feel true to herself no matter how hard she tried, but she didn’t let that hold her back. When Mulan got injured fighting the Huns and was found out as a woman, Steve’s breath caught. When Mulan’s soldier friends shunned her for the deception, Steve couldn’t stop the tears from swimming up into her eyes.

So it came as a nasty shock when Tony mused, “You know, I don’t really blame Shang for kicking her out.”

Steve felt frozen, afraid to say anything for fear she’d say too much.

“How can you say that? She just heroically saved everyone and almost died,” Bruce argued.

“Sure, but she’s also a proven liar,” Nat said laconically. “Men always get very emotional when betrayed, especially when it’s by a woman. They’re fighting a war for the survival of their country and she’s just put doubts in their minds about her trustworthiness, doubts they can’t afford. At least they treated her wounds first.” Her lips twisted. “For all they know, she could be a spy or an assassin, work women excel at. She’s lied to them once. Who’s to say she won’t do it again? Yet they care for her and she saved them, so just kicking her out instead of imprisonment makes sense”

“I like Mulan,” Clint said staunchly through a mouth full of popcorn. “I would’ve kept her.”

“Yes, but you’re stupidly trusting,” Nat pointed out indulgently.

“Kept you alive, didn’t it?” Clint said archly after swallowing.

Conceding the point with a tip of her head, Nat stole a piece of his popcorn. “Yes, but Shang isn’t you and China’s not SHIELD. In the ashes of their victory against the Huns, their military is too weak and unstable to risk it.”

Steve couldn’t keep silent any longer. “Mulan just wanted to protect her father and serve her country. They should’ve trusted her!”

“Aha,” leaning forward, Tony pointed to the heartbroken woman on the screen, “but just because the audience knows that doesn’t mean the Chinese do. Shang feels betrayed, his father just died, and he only escaped death for himself, his men, and his country by the skin of his teeth. Plus, he now has to personally report all that to his Emperor and spin it into a mighty victory. Mulan’s lies, her violation of the rules, it would just complicate things, especially when, as Nat pointed out, she could be a threat to the Emperor himself. They can visit her later when things calm down, but for now she’s a liability. This way, nothing gets hurt but her feelings.”

Biting her lip and staring blankly at the screen, trying not to let on how personal this argument had become, Steve asked, “What if she’d been a female Sentinel?”

“Then things would’ve gone worse for Mulan,” Clint said decisively. “After finding the destroyed village and burned doll, symbolizing dead children, the writers would’ve made Mulan go Feral. She’d have charged idiotically at the invading army, getting herself and her comrades killed, and maybe if she was lucky, dying dramatically in Shang’s arms after killing Shan Yu, leaving Shang as the only survivor or, more likely, the annoying advisor.”

“Rumors about going Feral are a big reason, besides our rarity, why no one wants to fight next to a female Sentinel,” Nat said with annoyance.

“That’s only because they’ve never been choked out by your muscled thighs or seen how hot you look in that skintight black suit while doing it,” Tony said both loyally and lecherously.

Clint took a loud slurp of soda. “Nat got twice as much push back as other agents because of her status, even though a partial Sentinel has never gone Feral and she can beat almost everyone at hand to hand.” The corners of his mouth tightened as he looked out the window. “She’s also less likely to ever find a Guide both compatible and willing to bond to her, especially a Guide who won’t demand she just stay safe at home popping out Gifted babies, but them’s the breaks for female Sentinels.”

Natasha gave him a complicated look. “Partial Sentinels like the two of us rarely get considered for bonding by Online Guides. Being both unbonded and a partial, people start assuming we’re too unstable to work well when the opposite is the truth. We’re more stable and capable than unbonded full Sentinels every day of the week.”

Silence fell in the minivan after that as attention drifted back to the movie.

Steve was happy to see Mulan get a happy ending after all, earning honor and respect as a female fighter. Nevertheless, the words of her teammates made Steve more determined than ever to keep her gender to herself. It sounded like they wouldn’t take her lying well. Being male wasn’t that bad anyways. Steve would be fine.

When _The Lion King_ started, Steve tried to focus on enjoying the music and art style instead of fretting about her true gender being exposed. Cocking her head to the side, she smiled in confusion. “Hey, I’ve seen spotted dogs just like that in Brooklyn,” she told her teammates when the three troublemakers came on-screen with Scar, the movie’s villain. “There’s a stray dog like that that lives in the alley below my window.”

“Rogers, I think your serum must be failing,” Tony said scornfully, “because there’s no way you saw a hyena on the streets of Brooklyn.”

Bruce tipped his head to the side, rebutting, “If Steve’s actually talking about a hyena and not just a spotted dog.”

Tapping on his phone for a moment, Tony shoved it in front of Steve’s face. “This is a hyena. Did your supposed dog look like this?”

The hyena had the same round ears, dark spots, short snout, and tuft of hair on its head that both Steve’s dog and the movie ones did. “Yeah, it looks the same. They had those hyenas on the streets back when I was growing up too.”

Tony blew a raspberry with his lips. “Nope, not possible. Hyenas are not dogs. They’re wild animals native to Africa. You might see them in zoos, but never roaming on the streets.”

“I know what I saw,” Steve said stubbornly, firming her jaw.

“Tony’s right, though it could’ve been dogs that just look like hyenas,” Nat said in a conciliatory tone of voice, snatching away Tony’s phone and ignoring his yelp of protest as she swiped through the pictures for Steve. “Spotted hyenas are pretty cool. They’re a matriarchal society, with dominant females larger than males. They’re also survivors, able to both hunt and scavenge as needed.”

“The girls have a pseudopenis,” Bruce added with a wag of his brows.

Clint spewed orange soda down his shirt. “A what?!” he asked, mopping off with the napkins Nat threw back at him.

“A pseudopenis,” Bruce smirked. “It looks like a male’s. The females actually give birth through it.”

Tony crossed his legs uncomfortably, “I wish you were joking. This is why I don’t do biology. Females with penises, penii? What’s the plural?” He looked at Clint, who shrugged and glanced down at his lap and then at the screen.

“I don’t know, but _none_ of the hyenas in this movie have a penis at all. I cry foul. We should lodge a complaint with the zoological society,” Clint cried, waving one of Bruce’s Red Vines in the air and then taking a bite.

“This is an American cartoon, of course no one has a penis,” Nat said calmly.

“As opposed to Japanese cartoons, but Cap’s too innocent to know about those,” Tony stage-whispered.

Confused about the species of her alley friend, who both looked like an African hyena and definitely had a penis, Steve blew out her breath. She didn’t want to know about Tony’s dirty cartoons. “Let’s just watch the movie.”

Pouting, Tony crossed his arms and kicked the back of Steve’s chair. “But you haven’t said the word _penis_ yet. Everyone else did, even Natasha.”

“What are we, twelve?” Steve asked incredulously.

“Tony’s right,” Clint said staunchly, the Red Vine hanging out of his mouth.

“Yeah, and do it quick before Mufasa dies,” Tony ordered, taking a sip of his bottled water.

Steve looked back at the screen quickly, “Wait, the dad dies?”

Grabbing her empty Raisinette box, Nat chucked it at Tony’s head. “Way to ruin the movie, Stark.”

Ignoring the red spot rising in the middle of his forehead, Tony kicked the back of Steve’s seat again. “Whatever, parents always die in Disney movies. Everyone knows that. C’mon, Cap, _say_ it.” He kicked the seat a third time.

“Tony... you are a dick,” Steve said sweetly.

The car erupted into laughter, but at least it got them off the topic of hyenas as they returned to watching and criticizing the movie.

Later that night, as Steve parked in the same underground garage to return the team home to Avengers tower, Tony cleared his throat before getting out. “I never thought I’d go watch Disney movies in a minivan, but this wasn’t that bad for a Team Night. Definitely better than the flute music. I mean, I don’t want to do this again—my back is killing me after hours in that crappy seat and I’m going to have to make an urgent appointment with my chiropractor—but go team... and all that.”

Steve smiled, hearing what he was really trying to say. “Thanks, Tony. You’re up next month for Team Night, but don’t go too crazy trying to top this.” She ignored his derisive look and called out to her departing team. “Don’t forget training on Monday at the FBI’s field course, everyone.”

Dramatically groaning, Clint leaned against the open door, “Agent Higginson isn’t going to be there, is he? I hate that guy.”

Before Steve could answer, her phone rang. Pulling it out of her pocket, she accidentally pressed several buttons. The sound of a crowded room surged into the minivan on speakerphone. “Hello?” Steve asked, holding it near her ear. It was a new model of phone and Steve couldn’t remember which button to press to make the call private. Steve waved at her friends to leave, but they blatantly ignored the gesture, settling back around the minivan to eavesdrop.

“Rogers, you’re dead,” growled Bucky in a sinister tone of voice. “You hear me? Dead."

Steve’s teammates went tense. Clint’s eyes darted around the parking garage looking for snipers and Nat pulled out a knife and a gun while breathing in deep trying to catch a scent. Tony tapped something into his phone with one hand while the other grabbed the remote for his suit. Bruce took a step back from the minivan and flushed faintly green.

Rolling her eyes fondly at their paranoia, Steve relaxed back in her seat. “Am I allowed to ask why I’m dead?”

"I’m innocently strolling through an art gallery and do you know what I see?” Bucky demanded hotly.

“Art?” Steve said dryly.

At Bucky’s mention of art, Tony slowly relaxed. He placed his hand on top of the minivan and leaned down to give Steve an irritated look. “I didn’t know the murderbot was capable of doing anything innocently.”

“Who’s that?” This time, Bucky’s voice was threaded with real violence. “It’s awfully late for guests, Stevie, isn’t it?”

Shifting uncomfortably at the rising animosity on either side, Steve quickly answered before Tony could open his mouth with another smart remark, “We just got back from team night at the drive-in and I accidentally turned on the speaker when I answered the phone. That was Tony Stark. Now, are you going to tell me what has you so upset or what?”

Bucky sighed with a mix of petulance and aggravation. “Fine, does the Jamie Pinup Series by pre-WWII-era artist Roger Stevens ring a bell?”

Bolting upright, Steve dropped her phone into the cup-holder. “Whoops.”

“Whoops?” Bucky demanded, voice going high-pitched and strident. “That’s all you have to say? Because Jamie’s face here looks awfully familiar except for the curls and cleavage,” Steve rubbed the back of her hot neck and squirmed, “and even without all my memories,” Bucky’s voice dropped to a heated whisper, “I don't think past me would've agreed to flashing everyone my hoo-hah while fixing a flat tire!"  

"She is not! I never drew nudes," Steve defended in a stubborn hiss, picking the phone back up to press against her ear as if that would make the conversation more private from her teammates, though at this point, even if she turned off the speaker, Nat would just use her Sentinel hearing and relay the words to the rest of them. At Bucky’s pointed silence, Steve guiltily conceded, “Though she’s probably showing a lot of bare thigh.”

"You can say that again. Did I know about this before?" Bucky asked grumpily.

"Not until now," Steve rushed to assure him, knowing Bucky hated the gaps in his memory.

“Well…” Bucky said slowly, shifting gears on Steve, “I hope you at least got a lot of money for these, because I look smokin’ hot as a girl. We sure grow ‘em right down in Brooklyn.”

A wolf-whistle jerked Steve’s attention away from the conversation to see the rest of her teammates looking at where Tony was projecting images of her Jamie Pinup Series. “He’s totally right, Jamie is smoking hot,” Clint said admiringly. Bruce nodded and Nat gave Steve a thumbs up.

Tony looked gleeful. “Where did my prudish little Cap go? I am shocked and appalled that you drew this,” he cried dramatically, hand on his heart. “Also, I have a new complex to discuss with a therapist, as I may now be harboring inappropriate thoughts about Steve’s one-armed menace wearing a dress and fixing cars.” Leaning closer to the phone, he asked, “Barnes, do you think your hair would still curl like that?”

“I dunno, Stark,” Bucky drawled, “next time I visit the lovely Pepper, I’ll ask her to try and curl it for me, though we might be too busy doing other things to remember to tell you the results.”

All amusement drained from Tony’s face. “No visiting Pepper. If that’s a threat, I’ll have my AI trace this call and end you.”

“So you can dish it out but can’t take it, eh Stark?” Bucky mocked, unmoved by the threat. “You’re a lot less intelligent than I gave you credit for, if you have to use your fancy AI Jarvis to trace the call after I straight out said I was at an art gallery looking at Stevie’s old art collection. A simple internet search would give you that location. Are you sure you’re good enough to be on a team with Steve and the rest of the Avengers? They at least have superhuman powers.” Steve winced, knowing Bucky had landed a direct hit on one of Tony’s insecurities that he wouldn't soon forgive.

Bucky continued, “Also, I’d never harm your girl. Not only is Pepper Potts a classy dame and better than a mook like you deserves, but she’s also Stevie’s friend and…” Bucky’s voice abruptly lost its superior tone, “well... not unless Hydra brainwashed me again. I have no control then. If that happens, you have my full permission to off me for good. Just make sure you keep Stevie from almost killing herself this time.”

“Hey,” Steve protested angrily, “that isn’t happening.”

Bucky cleared his throat. “Look, I just called to yell at you for the art thing, but now that’s done, I’m gonna go. Talk to you later, Steve.”

“No, wait—” Steve urged, but was met with the sound of the call disengaging. She had no way of contacting him and the phone number on his end always showed up looking scrambled. Steve sighed with frustration.

Turning to look at the team, she saw that Tony still looked upset. He angrily swiped away the pinup pictures he’d projected on the wall. Steve felt tired and not up to soothing his ego. “I’m going to return the rental car to the all-night key drop and call it a night. I’ll see you guys at training tomorrow.”

Bruce and Clint had already disappeared into the elevator.

Giving Steve a sympathetic look, Nat closed the doors on the minivan so Steve could drive off and casually stepped in front of Tony so he couldn’t advance and start a new argument. “See you later, Steve.”

Waving in thanks, Steve drove away in the silent, empty minivan.


	7. Chapter 7

As Steve tossed and turned, she couldn’t stop thinking about her friendly neighborhood hyena (something better to fixate on than her team thinking it okay to kick out Mulan for lying about being male or how Bucky gave Tony permission to sideline Steve and kill him if he got brainwashed again).  More internet searching at home confirmed that Steve had definitely been seeing a spotted hyena, not a dog, in both the past and present. Though now that she thought about it, Steve wasn’t sure if she’d been seeing different hyenas throughout the years or just the same animal over and over. Steve had no idea how that was even possible considering their lifespan, but she wasn’t crazy.

Hopefully.

That night she dreamed. Steve walked barefoot through a blue jungle wearing a simple, sleeveless white dress that ended at her knees. Unlike the forests of war-torn Europe, this place felt welcoming. Both her body and mind felt supple and light. Climbing a tree, Steve saw vast tracts of verdant forest leading down to the shore of a great ocean. If she concentrated, she could taste the faint tang of salt in the air and see iridescent lights pulsing beneath the water’s surface. For the first time in longer than she could remember, Steve’s fingers itched to capture the scene in pencil and ink. Hopping down, delighted by the flare of the dress around her perfectly muscled thighs, she travelled on, pulled forward by a faint tugging in her heart.

After crossing a cool stream, Steve circled a gigantic tree and found a clearing. Inside, Steve’s hyena friend lay basking on a rock in a puddle of sunlight. Meeting the hyena’s eyes, Steve felt something slot into place in her mind. Somehow Steve knew that the hyena was both female and friendly. The animal greeted Steve with a lazy tail flick and open-mouthed smile. Climbing to her feet, the hyena jerked her head demandingly and danced to the left.

Brow wrinkling, Steve looked over. She would’ve missed the wolf if he hadn’t lifted his head warily from where his body lay buried in a pile of old leaves. He seemed almost transparent in the shadows of the trees. The dingy white wolf was so skinny his ribs protruded and he was missing his foreleg, probably lost in a steel-jawed trap. The sight made Steve’s heart hurt and sparked her temper.

“Can I do anything to help?” she asked, going over to kneel by the wolf’s side and putting a gentle hand on his flank. Only after she’d done it did Steve realize she should have approached the wild animal more warily, but she just couldn’t believe the wolf would hurt her, not on purpose. It was the same knowing she’d gotten from the hyena, as if they were both somehow linked to her.

Running her hands over the wolf’s emaciated body, Steve couldn’t find any obvious wounds to fix, only badly healed scars. The contact seemed to help, as the wolf’s eyes brightened and he pressed back into her touch, his body becoming more solid and less skinny on each stroke of her hand. The hyena came over and began cleaning the wolf with her tongue, a familiarity the wolf seemed to accept with pleasure. Steve patiently carded her fingers through the wolf’s matted fur, removing years worth of dirt and debris.

“I’m Stevie, it’s nice to meet you guys,” Steve said, feeling the need to fill the silence. “Though, my sneaky hyena friend, it looks like we’ve actually been meeting up for years.” The hyena seemed unmoved by Steve’s scolding tone, giving Steve a haughty look as if to say Steve was the one at fault for not noticing, though she turned and swiped Steve’s arm with her rough, wet tongue, making Steve smile. “I guess the friend part is what’s important. Can I call you Joan? After Joan of Arc? She was my hero when I was a kid. They had the most beautiful painting of her in my church growing up, wearing full armor with sword raised.” The hyena leaned forward and licked Steve’s face from chin to eyebrow in approval.

With the two of them working on it, the wolf’s fur slowly became a shiny white and tangle free. Sprawled blissfully against Steve’s side, the wolf turned his head and licked Steve’s ankle. Finished, Steve smiled and patted his head.

Rising up onto her knees, Steve stretched, having lost track of just how long she’d been grooming. Before she could stand, Joan leapt up and knocked Steve face-forward into the leaves. They crunched loudly. Shoving her snout under the wolf, Joan flipped him over. He gave a shocked snort and jumped to his feet. Dancing back, the hyena cackled.

Steve lifted her head and spit out leaves. The wolf growled, though his ears and tail stayed perked up in play. “This means war,” Steve said.

Joan lowered her front and wiggled her butt in the air tauntingly.

Exchanging a look of solidarity with the wolf, Steve turned and launched herself at the hyena, moving just barely fast enough to get arms around her neck. The wolf darted in from the other side, not slowed by his missing limb, and pounced on the hyena’s rump. After a valiant struggle, Joan gave in and flattened to the ground beneath them with a huff.

Letting go, Steve sat up smugly and brushed a clump of animal hair off her cheek. However, before she could bask in her victory, the wolf let out a playful howl and switched sides, tackling Steve to the ground. Joan piled on top of Steve with a hyena grin. Laughing loudly, Steve surged to her feet, throwing off both animals. And so it went for the rest of the night, the three joyously playing together in the clearing.

Waking up the next morning, Steve felt better than she had in years. The lonely ache in her chest was the lightest it had ever been. She felt happy, like the clouds had parted to beam in rays of warm sun on a cool day.

Not only did she feel mentally lighter, she felt physically better too. All the little irritations of being a (fake) Sentinel in the 21st Century had disappeared. The intermittent headache, ringing sounds, bitter taste, and itching of her skin were conspicuous by their absence. The serum constantly refreshed Steve’s cells as needed to keep her healthy. In practice, this seemed to mean that instead of getting skin rashes and welts with strong chemicals like she’d seen in other Sentinels, she just flushed a light pink and felt like ants were crawling under her skin. Agent Higginson’s cologne got the ant reaction every time. Not being a complainer by nature, and after having her concerns dismissed as female hysteria in the 40s and as a delusion projected by her subconscious in jealousy of “real” Sentinels by the doctor at SHIELD, she’d stopped mentioning the discomfort altogether and just stoically endured. However, having that gone felt fabulous.

Giving a big stretch, Steve bounded out of bed. Straightening her pajamas, she padded into the kitchen whistling. It felt good to be alive.

 

* * *

 

“I give up,” Bucky announced to the ceiling as he kicked himself free from his sweat-soaked bed sheets for at least the fifth time. After travelling in circles through four different countries to get back to his apartment from the art museum undetected, he should be exhausted. Yet every time he fell asleep, he found himself chasing something maddeningly elusive that always stayed just out of reach. As the chase dragged on, he became more and more hollow, until only a tin man remained, too heavy to run and rusting into place, poisoning the ground where he decayed.

Since escaping Hydra’s control, he’d been taking mercenary contracts to keep busy, ranging from search-and-rescue to bodyguard to even hitman depending on the scumbag-level of the people involved. It had given him the chance to not only build a reputation and forge some new contacts, but to figure out who James B. Barnes was away from Hydra, Russia, and even the US Army. He’d had to figure that out first before he could tackle being Bucky for longer than a single phone call to Steve. He desperately wanted to get being Bucky right for both their sakes.

From what he could figure, the Winter Soldier had been mostly kept on ice over the decades since his creation. When needed, they’d thaw him out, program him, and send him out to rain down destruction for six months at most before wiping him and freezing him again for the next several years. Bucky had worried that his mind might habitually reset after six months out of cryo, so he’d sent Steve a farewell package containing a French tapestry illustrating a scene from _Don Quixote_ made by the Gobelins Royal Manufactory in the early 1700s that hopefully wasn’t too obviously a farewell and braced himself for reset or oblivion.

The days kept turning, but his mind stayed his own. At first he’d kept himself constantly on the move, but as new memories stopped returning, life became routine, and he wasn’t forgetting anything important, he let himself settle down in one place as an experiment. It was a small apartment with a modest rent in Bucharest, Romania.

Months passed and nothing disastrous happened, except for the fact that the old lady next door had conned him into fixing her scooter, caulking her tub, and swearing at football on the television with her once or twice a month. At least it had netted him some free food. Also conversation with someone whose worst sin was stealing internet from the unsecured wireless downstairs.

Unfortunately, it had forced Bucky to face the fact that he didn’t want to be alone anymore, that making friends with an old lady made him fiercely miss a different lady friend who’d probably never grow old.

Through isolation and constant work, Bucky had been punishing himself for the way he’d been used to hurt others. However, when insomnia forced him to dig deeper, he was forced to see that it didn’t seem to be doing anyone alive much good. When overworked, Bucky got cranky and more likely to take on assassination contracts for bad guys, which decreased the amount of bad in the world but didn’t necessarily increase the good. The isolation and grueling schedule also couldn’t bring back the people he’d killed, remove Zola’s serum from his body, or get his arm back.

Plus, by isolating himself, he’d been unintentionally punishing Steve, who talked a good game but sounded like a hot mess hiding behind the confident mask of Captain America, leader of the Avengers. Thinking about his current existence, Bucky was forced to admit that his life was empty. He wasn’t sure what he missed more, his real arm or Stevie.

Lifting his metal arm above his head, he twisted his wrist. The metal caught the faint light of predawn and recalibrated as he made a fist. Rippling and whirling into a new pattern, the metal plates moved with a deadly purr and ominous growl.

Scratch that, his metal arm was _awesome_. The thing missing was definitely Stevie.

No matter how much time passed, Bucky couldn’t escape his feelings for Steve.

Bucky didn’t know if he deserved to be happy, but he was dead certain that Stevie did, and even with only a limited batch of memories, he was pretty certain Steve was feeling miserable and lost. Someone desperately needed to fix that. For a while he’d had hope for the Avengers, but they were just as broken in their own ways. If they could’ve fixed Steve, they would’ve by now. Reading between the lines, Steve spent most of her time juggling her team’s egos, being confused by their innuendos (if she ever started flirting back, he’d be happy for her and then die of violent jealousy), training, punching the villain of the week, and moping alone in her dark apartment.

No one else seemed to be willing or able to do the job of wrestling Steve into line, so it was time for Bucky to take up the mantle once more. The fact that Bucky felt eager and excited for the excuse was no one's business but his own. He'd proved he could live on his own without a handler or murdering everyone he met and function with only limited memories of the past. Hell, he seemed to have adapted to the present better than Steve had.

As long as he didn’t hear the wrong code phrase in Russian and revert into a mindless assassin… everything should be fine… probably. Then again, maybe Bucky should stay away from Steve after all. What if he hurt her again?

Burying his fingers in his hair, Bucky yanked hard, but the pain barely registered. His thoughts were going in circles. Bucky was miserable. Steve was miserable too and Bucky could help. Plus, the Steve-shaped hole inside his head and his heart wouldn’t stop _aching_ and distracting him.

Disgusted with himself, Bucky launched himself out of bed and pulled out some underwear to get dressed. Picking up the printout of his next job, he read through the details again, but despite the subject’s ties to the Red Room and Hydra, he couldn’t lose himself in planning what was sure to be a challenging assassination. Instead, Bucky’s mind kept swerving back to images of Steve at different time points: thin and muscled, child and adult, climbing a tree in a checkered dress to return a fallen baby bird and leaping off a Hydra tank about to blow sky high after tossing a bomb down the hatch. It was ridiculous.

Dropping the file, he turned to harsh calisthenics, but even dripping with sweat and trembling from fatigue and strain, Bucky couldn’t shake this yearning for Steve. “Face it, Barnes,” he muttered to the floor in his modified plank position, “your honor is tarnished and your head’s a jigsaw puzzle. The missing pieces in your memories are gone for good and if you don’t find your courage and take a risk, the missing piece of your heart shaped like Stevie is going to stay lost as well. Steve’s either going to figure out a way to move on without you or she’s going to get herself killed.”

As if a switch had been flipped, Bucky found himself on his feet and holding a burner phone with Steve’s number already half-dialed. His mind tolled with the knowledge that either fate befalling Stevie would destroy the asset’s functionality, destroy James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes. Refusing to second-guess any more, Bucky finished dialing Steve’s number and hit send.

It rang twice before picking up, “Hello, Steve Rogers speaking.”

Bucky wiped his sweaty palm on his thigh. “Hey buddy, how’re you doing?”

“Real good, Bucky, especially with you calling me again so soon,” Steve said with a smile in her voice. “I hope you’ve forgiven me for the pictures and all.”

Once he’d finally gotten over the shock and talked to Steve, Bucky had felt more amused than anything else. His current self didn’t have much pride left to be offended. “Nah, the pictures are fine. You’ve always been real talented with your art. Have you drawn anything neat lately?” Now that they were talking, Bucky needed a moment to get up the gumption to bring up visiting. _What if Steve didn’t want him to come?_

Steve sighed. “I haven’t drawn anything in forever, to be honest, but I should probably try starting again. I used to spend most of my free time with a pencil in hand. It’s one of the few things I miss that I could actually do something about, since everything else is lost or outside my control,” she finished quietly.

“Speaking of that,” Bucky stalled, swallowing to wet his throat.

“Yeah Buck?” Steve prompted curiously.

“I was thinking of coming for a visit, a long visit, if you want,” he could hear Steve inhale sharply through the phone, “though I don’t have to stay with you if you want your privacy,” Bucky added quickly. “I can find myself a room somewhere else easily enough, since I might be dangerous and go crazy still.”

“No! I mean, yes! _Yes_ , please come and visit me, but I won’t hear of you staying somewhere else unless that’s what you want to do. I have a pullout couch here I can sleep on and give you my room, or a whole suite at Avengers Tower we could share, or I could get a new place with two bedrooms. Whatever you want. I only live here because it was the first place available in Brooklyn. I’m not really attached to it, or to anything to be honest. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Stay forever. I’m just so excited to see you again!” Steve gushed.

Bucky couldn’t help but catch a little of the happiness and excitement bubbling out of the phone. He relaxed. “I can hear that, Stevie, but don’t go making any big changes on my account. I just want to see you. I’m sure your couch will do me just fine for sleeping, especially considering some of the awful places we’ve shared before.”

“That sounds great. When are you coming?” Steve asked.

Leaning back against the wall, Bucky crossed his ankles and calculated. “I have to finish a job first, but after that I should be in Brooklyn by the end of next week at the latest, since it’s nearby.”

Steve cleared her throat and asked tentatively, "Can I ask what kind of job it is?"

"Not if you're going to be all judgmental about it,” Bucky frowned. “I know I get my hands more dirty than your shiny Captain America will, but I still have a code. As a private contractor, I’m my own boss. If I agree to do a hit, I only take out jobs on bad guys—absolutely no kids and no moms—and if the mom is a bad guy who needs taking out, I refer it to a guy I know with extremely precise aim and more moral flexibility. Mercenary work pays the bills and keeps my skills sharp. I’m good at it and I like it. Might as well use what I am for me and to do a little good instead of running away from it, you know?" Biting his lip, annoyed at how defensive he’d gotten, Bucky took a slow breath.

"I trust you, Bucky,” Steve said simply. “Do you need any help?"

Closing his eyes at Steve’s pure faith and unswerving loyalty, he swallowed. "Nah, you got better things do than help with my day job, things like save the city, keep that team of yours out of trouble, and brush up on your drawing skills so you can wow me when I visit. I’ll—I’ll see you soon."

“Sounds good. Let me know if you run into any trouble,” Steve said warmly.

Bucky snorted. “You punk, you’re the one who’s more likely to get into trouble.”

“Nope, most of the stupid still hangs around with you,” Steve shot back.

Smiling, Bucky said his goodbyes and hung up the phone.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crossover with The Pretender TV show in this chapter and my 2016 fic, “Mother of Sentinels.”

 

Bucky had a bad feeling that he was going to regret taking this hit on the Alpha Sentinel Prime of the Americas.

Just as well that he’d been conditioned to ignore his emotions.

All evidence pointed to this being an extremely challenging hit. The scarce information he had about his target came from mostly unreliable sources and, because of the enhanced senses of Sentinels and Guides, he had a high probability of getting himself captured or killed. If anyone asked, and he actually felt like answering, he’d most likely say he’d taken the job because his target was an evil woman with ties to his former captors and it paid very well.

All true, but the extra push that made him finally said yes was that the high risk of failure made for a thrilling challenge. That shot of adrenalin had been his only source of pleasure for most of the last century. Seeking after it was hardwired into him now. Difference was, seeking after it was his choice and under his control, not some heartless handler’s.

Plus, this mission would be a good release of tension before finally meeting up with Steve again. Bucky was ridiculously nervous about meeting up with Steve. The emotions she evoked were too strong for his mental conditioning to contain. She made him feel in rainbow colors when even a brighter shade of gray sometimes felt painfully blinding.

A deeply buried nugget of steel had been forcing its way to the surface of his mind since the moment he’d first seen her again, an absolute that said Stevie was his to protect, his to love. Bucky didn’t know if he was capable of love anymore, but if Steve was meant to be his, he had to try and be worthy of that. The nest egg he earned on this job would give him the financial flexibility to take his time and figure out what being Bucky and Stevie meant. He just had to survive this so he could meet up with her again.

So he would.

The blazing summer heat in Delaware gave him a good excuse to linger inside after buying his ice cream. They did amazing things with ice cream nowadays. Kids didn’t know how good they had it.  

By sitting in the corner booth of the ice cream shop, he had a perfect view of the Sentinel & Guide Center down the street. It was located in a thriving area of Dover, full of businesses, restaurants, and schools. A steady stream of customers kept the door on the bell jingling, the employees hopping, and his presence from being remarked upon. In addition to businessmen and midday shoppers, the shop saw regular groups of students dressed in navy slacks and white shirts from Summit Academy nearby. The ice cream shop must have a deal going on for summer school, because the little kids came and went in groups led by pimpled teenaged chaperones clutching envelopes full of ice cream cone vouchers.

Bucky had to do a double-take at one point, sudden vertigo surging through his mind and almost making him drop his benign façade when one of the teenaged chaperones turned around with a grin on his face. The boy was the spitting image of Bucky at seventeen, complete with slicked-flat and side-parted hair, dimpled chin, charming grin, and suspenders over a white button-up. Memories fizzed into Bucky’s mind in little bursts, images of carefully doing up his hair in the mornings and getting ready for dates with dames.

The boy smiled charmingly at the female cashier, trying to get her to give one of his charges an extra free ice cream even though they were a voucher short. He leaned forward and looked up at the girl through his lashes, his lips coy and his body language an invitation. Her cheeks pinked. Dazzled, she nodded and bit her lip, turning to get him the extra ice cream with a swish of her hips. When she peeked over her shoulder he flashed a smirk and wink, causing her to blush even harder and almost fumble the cone. Taking it, the boy thanked her for the favor and left with a spring in his step.

Bucky could barely believe that had been him once.

Could the boy be a relative? Maybe one of Bucky’s little sisters had had kids? Grandkids? After all this time, it could even be great-grandkids.

By now, his little sisters must be old and gray and wrinkled, small and shrunken because of the ravages of time instead of small as all little girls are, as they’d been the last time he’d seen them curled against his mother’s side. But it had been too long. Just like his mother, those little girls had passed through time into old age and likely lay in a casket somewhere turning to dust. When his mind had been too fractured to even wish for death, his little sisters had most likely withered and died, as all innocent things do. His mother and sisters were lost to him forever….

_Breathing shallow. Heartrate elevated. Situational awareness down. Emotions high. Asset functionality impaired. Mission endangered._

_Evaluate surroundings… cover maintained. Threats minimal. Proceed with mission._

_Report malfunction to handler and request asset retraining post-mission. Implement self-punishment protocol Ж2A in 3…2—_ **Nyet**!

_NO! I am not their asset anymore! I am Bucky Barnes. I am James Buchanan Bucky Barnes and I belong to myself. This body is mine. This mind is mine. I’m the one who chooses to pull the trigger or offer an open hand. I take the action and the consequences for myself._

He breathed deeply and pushed away his emotions, counting on each inhale and exhale, until he’d regained mastery of his body and mind. Once calm, he scanned his surroundings to see if anyone had noticed his lapse, but nothing had changed. The mission hadn’t been compromised.

Staying analytical, Bucky made himself look at the boy again. Although there were similarities to a teenaged Bucky, there were differences too. The boy’s eyes were a tad too wideset and carefree, his brows more sculpted, his frame merely athletic instead of corded with the wiry muscles of someone who’d worked hard labor jobs for years.

Emotion seeped back into Bucky’s thoughts, painting color through his monochrome mind that got harder and harder to dam away as the weeks and months passed.

He turned away. At this point, the boy’s background didn’t matter. Even if any of Bucky’s sisters still lived, they’d long ago come to peace about their older brother the dead war hero. He wasn’t going to show up now to disrupt their lives. What could they possibly discuss after all this time? What good would that do?

Bucky was trouble. No one wanted that.

Well, except for maybe Stevie, but she was a special kind of crazy and always had been.

Shaking off his thoughts, Bucky returned to his mission. To blend in, he wore black-framed glasses, slacks, and a baggy polo shirt that made him look like a man trying to hide a thickening waist instead of someone packed with layers of muscle. By slouching and adjusting his center of gravity when he moved, he hid most of his menacing aura and looked almost normal. A local newspaper folded open to the crossword completed the look. People glanced at him and saw just another businessman on break or father waiting to pick up his kid. No one spared him a second thought.

The large clock on the wall ticked loudly, suddenly audible as the last group of summer school students exited the door to rush back to school for noon pickup. He needed to start eating or his lingering would start to look suspicious. He’d been sitting so long that his milkshake had started to liquefy. The cup was dripping with condensation.

Plunging his spoon in deep, he swirled and lifted up a dripping spoonful of Butterfinger milkshake (the name had made him curious and amused). Quickly shoving it into his mouth before it could splatter on the table, Bucky felt his eyes go wide. He barely swallowed back a husky moan. The silky ice cream coated his tongue with creamy vanilla, crunchy bits of peanut butter candy, and dark notes of chocolate. Bucky took another large bite. Hydra hadn’t allowed the Asset any sugar. Even ignoring the decades of torture, assassination, and brainwashing, that was a killable offense right there.

Licking sweet bursts of candy from his lips, Bucky pretended to watch the TV mounted on the wall instead of the security change at the S&G Center currently housing the Alpha Sentinel Prime of the Americas. The place had regular patrols by Sentinel and Guide security forces, meaning he’d have to get past the enhanced physical and empathic senses of just about everyone inside.

Bucky had eluded their type before. Admittedly in smaller numbers, but what was life without challenges? It made the exhilaration of victory all the sweeter.

The S&G Center was a large, modern building sheathed entirely in transparent glass. Each of the conference and rec rooms on the ground floor and all of the exterior work spaces had transparent walls, a warning that privacy was limited in a building full of Sentinels. It made collecting information on their habits unexpectedly easy. Extra floors had been added to the building during the renovation ten years ago, including balconies with umbrella covered tables for lunch breaks and vertical gardens cascading with greenery. Since the upper floors and balconies had been added after the surrounding neighborhood was already established, tall trees and buildings crowded the space. For the employees of the S&G Center, each balcony probably felt like shaded oasis. For Bucky, they were a way to bypass security. 

The guards had gotten cocky and focused most of their security measures on the bottom floor. Everything in between seemed strangely open. They didn’t bother paying for cutting edge security technology because they believed their biological superiority was sufficient. From what he’d seen so far, the Sentinels did the patrols and the Guides manned the desks inside, switching it up only rarely. They moved like normal guards the world over, not seeming to adjust for their extra Gifts.

What they failed to realize was that natural talent was no substitute for brutal training, especially when that training spanned decades.

Today, he’d prove himself superior. He didn’t have to be a Sentinel or a Guide—hadn’t been one since Zola, even then more of an irritation than a gift, the brush of white fur in his dreams wishful thinking and illusion—to get inside. The Gifted’s assumption of safety would work against them.  

He had the security and building layout memorized, so the largest unknown lay in how his target would react. There were large blanks in his target’s file that might just jump out to bite him. Alpha Sentinel Parker was a rare female Sentinel who zealously guarded her privacy. Those who met her either hated her or loved her and her inner circle was very small and rabidly loyal. Parker was perhaps the most respected Sentinel on the planet, though the mundane press had never gotten a straight answer as to why. In fact, very little was known about her at all, even when he threw money at the problem.

Bucky had grown up being told that female Sentinels were as likely to exist as unicorns. (His past suspicions about Stevie didn’t count, as nothing she did could be considered normal and the serum just made that tendency worse.)  Now female Sentinels were on every continent and the newspapers had pictures of the Avengers fighting unicorns in the streets.

It was a very different world than the one he’d grown up in.

He’d prefer taking Parker out with a sniper rifle (Sentinels could smell explosives), but the client had insisted on up close and personal. The Winter Soldier had been paid generously to kill Sentinel Parker in such a way that it sent a message that not even Alpha Sentinel Primes were safe, much less all the lesser Sentinels and Guides in the organization.

The evidence he’d been given against Sentinel Parker was damning. He wouldn’t have taken the hit otherwise. Somehow she’d managed to get around the supposedly hardwired Sentinel instinct to protect others and was profiting off the trafficking of underage and malleable Sentinels and Guides to illegal organizations like Hydra and AIM. If you got to them early enough with the brainwashing, you could convince someone that everything they did was for the greater good, that horrible things were necessary to protect the tribe. Just thinking about it made Bucky feel violent.

Parker must have been trained from childhood to be a zealot, convinced that she was protecting society at large with her actions. Otherwise, the hypocrisy would render her Sentinel powers null and break her bond with her Guide. She’d lose her position.

Considering Sentinel Parker was perhaps the most revered Sentinel on the planet, there was almost no information available on her prior to her takeover of the Dover S&G Center about fifteen years earlier. He’d been forced to trust that the limited intelligence he’d gathered from his contacts and been given by his employer was legitimate. Unfortunately, most of his sources were still more loyal to the money than scared of him, though he was working on that. The file from his employer was also obviously biased to present Sentinel Parker as a monster with few redeeming qualities.

Bucky was half convinced that this was just an elaborate attempt to kill off the Winter Soldier using the Sentinel community as a tool. His employer had insisted on the close-up kill of a female Alpha Sentinel zealously guarded by a pack of rabidly protective Sentinels and Guides. Even once he succeeded, there was still a high probability that the assassination would turn one of the Sentinels Feral and get Bucky ripped limb from limb.

It made him feel wary, but not so much that he was going to back out. Plus, there was that zing of pitting himself against the odds and coming out on top.

Taking another delectable bite of his shake, he went over the information about his target one more time. Sentinel Parker was a striking brunette in her mid-forties, with tanned skin and a well-toned body for a woman her age. Everything from her clothing and jewelry to her makeup and haircut screamed money, luxury, and class. Even no longer in the first blush of youth, she still made people’s heads turn and men lose their tongues. Parker used her beauty like a weapon. Those she met described her as assertive, impatient, intelligent, and demanding.

Parker and her Guide also had a weird name thing going on. Her first name wasn’t reported anywhere, only her last. In contrast, her mysterious Guide, a man named Jarod, never used his last name anywhere, only his first. It made ferreting out private information about either of them even more difficult than usual.

Sentinel Parker and Guide Jarod were not just bonded, they were married, though no legal record could be found. Even amongst other Sentinel/Guide pairs, their devotion and synergy was remarked on with admiration. Luckily they had no children despite their years together, as Barnes’s code didn’t allow hits on moms. Besides, anyone who sold children to terrorist organizations shouldn’t be having children of her own.

Fifteen years earlier, the two had burst onto the public scene in a dramatic rescue of three Gifted teenagers who’d been kidnapped by a powerful corporation known as The Centre, leading to The Centre’s collapse. Famous for the rescue but rabid about their privacy, they papers merely reported that the two had laid low the first year and then jumped to the top overnight, going from heads of the Dover S&G Center to leading the American S&G Council. From there it was only a few months before they were elected as Directors of the newly formed International Sentinel & Guide Council. They’d been calling the shots of Sentinels and Guides around the world ever since.

What wasn’t publicly known was that Miss Parker was actually a daughter of The Centre, the organization whose destruction catapulted her to fame. According to the little he could dig up, The Centre had been rotten to the core and she had grown up inside it, being groomed to take over one day from her father. It specialized in psychological experimentation and the forecasting and forcing of events for those with the money to pay.

Amongst other things, The Centre had assisted the Red Room in refining their mental techniques for turning innocent girls into Black Widows, including the wiping and implanting of memories. Most of the victims’ brains hadn’t been able to cope past their early twenties despite receiving Russia’s version of the super soldier serum along with biotechnological enhancements, leading to catastrophic brain failure and early death. Only one Black Widow had escaped and thrived: Natalia Romanova, the woman currently fighting with the Avengers. The Centre had also consulted with Hydra on the transfer of the Winter Soldier from Russia into their care and helped train Alexander Pierce in asset handling.

The Centre had been a family business, founded and led by Parkers. Miss Parker herself had been a loyal daughter and employee climbing her way to the top until the day she unexpectedly came Online as a Sentinel and was forced by circumstance to make a lateral career change. She took over the Dover S&G Center instead.

Once Online, her career at The Centre was over. The protective instincts of a Sentinel wouldn’t allow them to do work they knew would harm “the tribe.” It was hardwired into their biology. Organizations with a powerful enough ideology and early brainwashing could sometimes trick a Sentinel into doing ambivalent deeds for the greater good (Hydra had employed several and treated them with kid gloves so as not to break the conditioning), but Parker was supposedly too intelligent and too close to The Centre’s dirty secrets for that level of obfuscation to work. He hadn’t been able to get independent verification that she’d knowingly collaborated with his enemies, but the circumstantial evidence all pointed in that direction.

It was whispered that Sentinels and Guides who knowingly took actions contrary to their protective drives were psychically punished for it. They supposedly lost power, their senses weakened, and their bonds could even brake. In his research, several independent sources had reported that Sentinel Parker psychically “felt” much much weaker than an Alpha Sentinel Prime should, especially one at the pinnacle of power. She and her Guide often worked independently from each other as well.

Those sources lent credence to his employer’s information claiming that Sentinel Parker was a corrupt zealot still in contact with the remnants of Hydra and was actively selling information about Gifted children to them and other terrorist organizations. Parker had no maternal instinct and showed no regard for the children in her care. The woman needed to be stopped and brought to justice. She deserved to die by his hand.

Getting up casually from his seat as a group of rowdy teenagers dressed in clashing neon colors entered, Bucky threw his empty cup in the trash and went to wash his hands. The security on Sentinel Parker was excellent, but he knew he was better.

As soon as the restroom emptied of people, he stripped off his baggy polo, slacks, and glasses, pulling on his urban camouflage tac gear. His mind became focused on his upcoming task. The Winter Soldier popped a ceiling tile, climbed up, replaced it, and then silently crawled through the ceiling until he reached the office in the back corner of the building. The locked office door had been in full view of the restaurant and had a high risk of discovery, so he’d taken the high road. Dropping down lightly into the office, he fixed the ceiling tile and climbed out the window, pulling it closed behind him.

In a feat of superhuman strength and agility, he leapt to the trunk of the nearest tree and climbed to an upper branch. Working his way out to the end, the branch began sagging under his weight. None of the people on the street far below noticed. He jumped to the next tree, caught a branch with his metal arm, and worked his way over to the trunk and then to an upper branch on the opposite side of the tree. From there, he jumped onto the neighboring building, the tallest one on the street and incidentally next door to the S&G Center. Climbing onto a narrow window ledge, he circled to the back of the building, found shallow handholds in the stonework for his fingertips, and began climbing up to the roof, digging new holds with his metal fingers when necessary. His tac gear helped him blend into the side of the building in case anyone looked up.

Once on the roof, he checked his watch and settled in. He’d made it with time to spare. The sun blazed down, making sweat pool in his collarbones and the small of his back. The cold ice cream became a distant memory. Keeping his breathing even and his thoughts serene, the Soldier dissociated from the discomfort and waited for the signal.

Finally the bell at Summit Academy began tolling the noon hour and playing a thirty second music number from its bell tower. Morning Summer School had ended. Children scattered out the doors, piling into the cars and minivans clogging the narrow road. The taco shop on the corner flipped the sign to begin their lunch promotion. A double-decker tour bus and a city bus stopped at the red light in front of the S&G Center just as a school bus started to turn in front of them onto the street leading to the school.

Lifting his gun, the Winter Soldier took aim at the school bus and fired twice. His bullets blew both tires along the length of the school bus. The bus jolted and tipped at a sharp angle as it skidded to a stop in the intersection. A minivan riding too close to the bus rear-ended it with a screech of brakes and an earsplitting crunch.

Seeing a school bus involved in an accident, no one noticed that it was completely empty except for the driver. Everyone assumed children were in danger. Concerned adults and rubberneckers rushed out of the surrounding buildings and cars, flooding the streets, shouting for help, and snapping pictures with their phones. Everything ground to a halt in the intersection, trapping the other two buses in front of the S&G Center, drawing everyone’s attention, and blocking sightlines.

The Soldier had a very limited window before security got suspicious. He couldn’t risk a Sentinel hearing the distinctive sound of a zip-line deploying. Luckily, a thud could be dismissed as almost anything.

With all eyes on the accident, no one was looking up for a few critical moments. Focused and calm, he backed up and took a running jump, soaring across the open gap to a balcony on the S&G Center down below.

An unexpectedly strong gust of wind hit him mid-leap. His fingertips brushed the edge of the railing and closed on nothing. He plummeted through the air.   

Contorting his body as wind slapped at him from all directions, he refused to panic. He stretched his metal hand out behind his back and braced himself. The moment his fingers felt something solid they clamped tight, locking onto a lower down balcony railing. His body banged hard into the wall, bouncing and swinging back and forth. He reached up with his flesh hand and stabilized himself. His landing had caused contusions and bruising, but nothing incapacitating. A normal arm would have been dislocated, but his metal arm took the punishment without complaint.

No part of the asset was allowed to complain.

The Soldier stayed silent and counted to sixty. No one came running and the balcony was deserted. Climbing over the railing onto the balcony, he unzipped his bag and pulled out the sweat-stained undershirt and uniform top he’d stolen from the backseat of a truck belonging to a brown-haired security guard with a similar build. A cursory scan from a Sentinel would make them think the Soldier smelled and looked like he belonged on the upper floors. Keeping his emotions calm so as not to tip off a Guide was automatic by this point too. He could revel in the thrill of success later, once he’d finished the job.

Entering the balcony doors into a lounge scattered with small tables, chairs, and potted plants, he turned right, took the stairs up to the correct floor, and then strode confidently but calmly towards Sentinel Parker’s office. He passed several people plastered to the windows looking down at the bus accident outside. None of them spared him a second glance.

In the antechamber of Sentinel Parker’s office, her admin was out on lunch break. His intelligence had reported that Parker usually worked through meals unless dragged off by her Guide, and that he preferred interrupting her for dinner. Sentinel Parker used industrial strength white noise generators in her office to help her focus, so once inside he should only have to worry about spikes of emotion drawing attention, not noise. If she wasn’t there, he would simply wait until she returned.

Palming a knife, he opened the office door. If he used a gun, security would come running at the distinctive sound. Bucky had a date with Steve he didn’t intend to miss, so the Winter Soldier would have to stick with the silence and surety of the blade.

Sentinel Parker, dressed in a designer suit of dark red and deep purple, sat at her desk typing furiously. She didn’t notice his entrance, too absorbed in her work. The white noise generator produced a loud background hum, drowning out outside noises. Getting into her office had been disappointingly easy, but he wouldn’t allow himself to get overconfident. Silently he closed the door and padded inside.

Sentinel Parker was everything they’d said and more. Not only was she a strikingly beautiful woman, but even distracted she exuded a subtle air of danger, as if to disturb her was to poke a sleeping dragon. She looked like the kind of woman who’d take you on the ride of your life and, even if you managed to survive, she’d probably forget your name a few days later.

Nevertheless, something about her tugged at him, disturbing his surety about the rightness of his actions. It couldn’t just be her physical beauty; that hadn’t swayed him in a long time. No, it was something else, something he had trouble articulating. It felt like he was malfunctioning again.  Sudden doubts tried to force their way to the surface of his mind, but he shoved them down hard. Nothing had changed. He had decided she was guilty and one look at her didn’t change that. It was too late. He was already committed, but at least he could make it quick.

Striding forward slowly and smoothly, the Winter Soldier sliced at Sentinel Parker’s throat, preparing to follow up with a stab through the heart.

With only seconds to spare, she looked up, eyes going wide even as she instinctively dodged the knife. Instead of screaming and panicking, she rolled out of her chair with deadly grace and swiped a metal tribal statue from her desk, parrying his follow-up attack so the knife swung wide. She had a lot more training than he’d expected.

Sentinel Parker went on the offensive, jabbing at his nose with a fist while kicking his leg with a sharp-toed high heel. She drew a gun hidden beneath her jacket in the split-second he took to dodge. He admired her gumption, but it was time to end this. Using an open palm, he shoved her gun arm wide and then yanked her close, trapping her arm under his and immobilizing her struggling body as he angled his knife around her back to slip up through her ribs and pierce her heart. Just as the tip of the Soldier’s sharp knife sliced through her jacket, their skin touched for the first time as her forehead glanced off his bare throat.

Bucky froze.

Everything in his mind shrieked and revolted. It felt worse than when his cryochamber malfunctioned. His heart pounded and air panted through his lips. A strange thought crystalized in the forefront of his mind. Somehow, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was true.

Bucky spat out a curse. “You’re The Mother.”

“Yes,” Parker said cautiously, her voice strained from the arch of her body and the prick of the knife against her back.

Bucky cursed again. Everything had just gone pear-shaped. “Your file didn’t say anything about that. I don’t kill mothers anymore. You feel like _my_ mother and I don’t even remember my mother. _Hell_.” Jerking away, he shoved Parker onto the modern couch against the wall, sheathed his knife, and staged a quick retreat to break out through the window.

“Wait,” she commanded. Her voice reverberated unnaturally in his mind. Just before his metal arm could smash through the glass, the voice jerked him to a stop without his conscious control. Powerful Guides were said to have a voice that could compel others, but it wasn’t supposed to be a Gift of Sentinels.

Rage flooded the Asset’s mind at being made a puppet once more. Pulling a knife, he twisted and threw. Eyes snapping wide, Parker jerked sideways over her desk just in time. The blade sliced across the tanned thigh bared by her short skirt instead of burying itself in her gut.

“Okay, that was a bad idea. Noted,” she said in a hard voice as she reached down to probe the slice on her thigh, wary but refusing to show him any fear. He couldn’t help but respect that. She flinched at the touch of her fingers, but otherwise didn’t seem too phased by the blood dripping down to her knee. He could see the faint white scar of a bullet graze just above the slice of his knife.

Meeting his gaze confidently, she shrugged. “At least the knife missed my skirt. This is my favorite Armani skirt suit and blood does not wash out of this type of fabric. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“I can still kill you,” the Soldier threatened, stepping back to press against the cool glass. “I won’t be enslaved again, if you’re trying to get me to stick around long enough to get captured.” Nevertheless, he didn’t break the glass and escape. He waited for her response, more curious than afraid, more fool he.

Sentinel Parker didn’t disappoint, brazenly turning her back on him and walking over to a side table. “Strangely enough, I’m not interested in punishing you. Usually I’m quite mean, so this is just as bizarre for me as it is for you.” She picked up a potted plant, pulled out a small bottle of liquor from the base, and then shook it in disgust when it proved to be mostly empty. Draining the few drops inside, she tossed the empty bottle back into the plant, followed a second later by the cap. Then, with a sigh of irritation, she snatched up a wad of tissues and pressed them against the seeping slice on her leg.

Bucky felt drawn to this woman and suddenly and inexplicably confident of her innocence. He’d been deceived. Her death would’ve been unjust. Somehow he knew that The Mother would never endanger her children. That her fearlessness reminded him of Stevie just put the final nail in the coffin. A wash of relief and shame flowed through him at what he had almost done.

Looking straight into his eyes, she demanded his attention in a way he could, but for some reason didn’t want to, break. “Look, I can feel that you’ve been blood bonded by a Sentinel and are riddled with missing pieces,” she said abruptly.  “Although I never wanted it, I’m The Mother of Sentinels. It sometimes makes me do instinctual nurturing things that otherwise go completely against my violent and bitchy personality. Right now, my inner sense is telling me that the assassin who just tried to kill me is supposed to be one of my kids, that this dormant Guide is unjustly wounded and deserves fixing, that there’s a Sentinel and two spirit animals desperately needing him, and that I can help restore some of those missing pieces and make the boo boos better.”

Grimacing, she looked appalled. “I can’t believe I just said the word boo boos,” she muttered in disgust. “Shoot me now.” Her eyes flicked back to him uneasily and she quickly added, “That wasn’t a literal request.”

“I assumed,” he said wryly, leaning against the window but keeping his fingers near his weapons. The Winter Soldier was sinking back down into the depths to rest, leaving Bucky in charge. He should be getting out of here, but some heretofore unexplored part of his psyche wanted to trust everything this woman said, felt willing to storm the gates of hell if she gave the word.

“I’m not so sure I ever was a Guide,” Bucky said, trying to make sense of it all, “but what did you mean by calling me blood bonded to a Sentinel with two spirit animals? How is that even possible?”

Licking her lips, Sentinel Parker leaned her unwounded leg against her desk. “Look, I can only tell you what I sense. At some point a Sentinel close to you tasted blood from your lips, either on purpose or accidentally. It doesn’t matter which.” Bucky’s mind raced through his fractured memories, settling on the one and only awkward kiss he’d shared with Stevie, at least that he could remember.

“Used to be, a blood kiss was given by a latent Guide to their chosen Sentinel as a promise of bonding once they came Online, sort of a spiritual betrothal. It’s fallen out of fashion in modern day society, but somehow you have one of those spiritual bonds. Something bad must’ve happened after that to turn your emerging Guide gifts dormant. That sort of thing usually destroys a spirit animal, but yours somehow managed to retreat down that nascent bond with your Sentinel and stay alive.” Lifting the wad of tissues away from her leg to confirm that the bleeding had mostly stopped, Parker tossed it in the trash.

Barely breathing, Bucky tried not to hope as Sentinel Parker continued. “Whoever your Sentinel is, they’ve got to be possessive, self-sacrificing, and more stubborn than a mule. Humans aren’t meant to carry the weight of two spirit animals. The constant pull from the astral plane would cause micro-fissures in the psyche and constantly pull sensory levels off-center. Your Sentinel’s got to be a total mess. Though they did bond with a Guide who’s also an assassin, so that probably says something right there,” she finished acerbically.

There was a high probability that this was too good to be true, nevertheless... “Just what are you proposing?”

Sentinel Parker crossed her arms coolly. “Not charity. I also have no interest in a slave and have a feeling you’ve been used enough. We’d do an exchange of services. To start with, we’d both pretend you didn’t just try to kill me. For the next month, you’ll be my security consultant, fixing the holes in my defenses where the next wave of assassins might attack, though there shouldn’t be that many considering I employ Sentinels and Guides. You must be very good to have gotten in.”

Bucky snorted. “I am, but I also just conclusively proved that your security sucks. We’ve been talking for how long and they still haven’t stormed in here? One month might not be enough training for those goons. I don’t do miracles. I’m a mercenary and assassin, not a saint.”

Eyes going stormy, Sentinel Parker nodded sharply. “My security will be hearing about that at length, believe me. Those mouth-breathers will regret the day they signed their employment contracts and slept through training.” Burgundy painted lips going tight, she took a slow breath. “I’ll give you a bonus for the name of your employer, but that’s not a requirement of the deal.”

Bucky shook his head.  “No chance, but considering the dossier they fed me, and who it feels like you are, I’m now pretty convinced that they didn’t mean for me to survive this job. I’ll be paying them a personal visit later.”

“If I can help, let me know. Otherwise, you keep me and my people safe for one month and then we’re free and clear. In return, I’ll give you access to the strongest mind healers in the world and my personal promise that they’ll do their best to restore your missing pieces. I’ll make your mind and Gifts their priority. My people will protect you like you’re one of our own.”

Lips quirking skeptically, he drawled, “Because you’ll order them to help the unknown assassin sent to kill you and they’ll just go along with that? Really?”

“Yes.” Sentinel Parker smiled sharply. “Because I order it and because you are one of us. Aren’t you?”

Bucky didn’t know. He’d barely figured out his current personality. Did he really want to go adding Guide gifts to that? The thing with Stevie was all conjecture, after all. But on the other hand, they might be able to remove his triggers and restore more memories of his former life. Teetering on the edge of decision, he couldn’t help but ask for a little more confirmation. “They said you were part of The Centre, working with the Red Room and Hydra.”

Meeting his eyes unflinchingly, she nodded. “I grew up in The Centre. Once I learned the truth about their practices, once I stopped _pretending_ ,” her burgundy-glossed lips tilted up as if at a private joke, “I tried to combat The Centre’s evil from the inside as best I could. When my efforts proved too small and their evil finally hit too close to home, I left and destroyed The Centre from the outside. I’ve done my best since then to atone for the mistakes my family made by restoring the community of Sentinels and Guides around the world. I would think that a man who doesn’t kill mothers anymore might understand a little bit about atonement.”

Dropping his eyes, Bucky swallowed. He offered his final objection to this crazy plan. “I can’t be a Guide. Everyone says Guides are weak and emotional, afraid of confrontation and meek doormats to their Sentinels.” Even as he said it, he didn’t really believe it, but what she was offering seemed too good to be true.

Sentinel Parker looked over her shoulder and smirked. “You might want to brace yourself and try to look unthreatening if you don’t want to be killed.”

Bucky didn’t have it in him to look harmless right then. His thoughts turned randomly to the lookalike kid flirting with the cashier in the ice cream parlor earlier. Harmless was out, but he could turn the potential for violence into the potential for sex. Leaning his shoulders back against the window, he crossed his arms, and widened his legs until his pants pulled obscenely tight across his thighs. “I thought we were still negotiating?” Letting his eyes go heavy lidded and full of invitation, he dragged his eyes up and down Parker’s body like a physical touch.

“Oh, you’re naughty,” she said with admiration. “Once I get past the assassination attempt, I’m definitely going to like you, but that look isn’t likely to get you any less killed.”

The air suddenly became heavy with a feeling of approaching danger. The hairs on the back of Bucky’s neck rose in response. Seconds later, the door burst open and the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome charged in, looking like the wrath of God dressed all in black. A storm cloud of menace seemed to suck all of the air out of the room as the avenging angel’s eyes honed in on Bucky’s flirtatious sprawl. Pointing a gun at Bucky’s forehead, he glared with murderous intensity and advanced.

Bucky wondered if today really was going to be his day to die.

“Meet my Guide and husband, Jarod,” Sentinel Parker said with evil cheer. “As you can see, he’s weak and emotional, afraid of confrontations, and often confused for a meek doormat.”

Guide Jarod scowled and moved to place himself in front of his wife. “He hurt you. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot him between the eyes.”

Sentinel Parker arched her brow and sent Bucky a smug look.

“I stand corrected,” Bucky said with amusement. Straightening up slowly in case Jarod’s trigger finger got twitchy, he held his arms out wide and sent Sentinel Parker a toothy smile. “Okay Ma, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

A few days later, Bucky made a guy who owed him a favor and was too scared to say no to pass on a letter to Steve up in New York City. It was probably cowardly to do it by note instead of over the phone, but all the digging around in his head had him feeling shaky. He was afraid of what he might accidentally say.

Besides which, Steve might be having second thoughts about having this new, bloodstained version of Bucky staying in her home instead of the old toothless charmer he used to be. Steve desperately wanted something of her past to still exist and he just happened to be what she was left with. She was so desperate she was settling. If she wised up and felt relief at his visit being postponed, he didn’t want to know about it. He’d tackle that later.

Bucky promised to stop acting so rabbit-hearted as soon as he got his brain fixed right.

If he showed up as a full-fledged wolf Guide with his memories back, Steve would have to forgive him, right?

 

* * *

 

Ducking as a metal foot flew overhead, Captain America slammed a Doombot’s neck with the edge of her shield, decapitating it in a shower of sparks. The Doombot collapsed to the ground. When no more green cloaked robots appeared, Steve lowered her shield and took a breather.

The Avengers were providing support to the Fantastic Four in their current skirmish against Doctor Doom and his Doombots. Thor was out of town still, but the rest of them seemed to have things contained except for the occasional Doombot who wandered too close to the idiotically gawking crowds. Most of the action was centered on Doctor Doom and the Fantastic Four.

Iron Man kept griping about this being a waste of their time and not having enough to do, but Steve didn’t mind. It gave her a distraction while she waited for Bucky to finally get here. She’d already deep cleaned her apartment four times, trimmed her hair, and gone on two separate trips to buy extra sheets and towels. In case they got bored or ran out of things to talk about, she’d gone to the library and checked out a stack of movies and books. The librarian had even shown Steve how to check out board games. Bucky was going to have such a good time, he’d never want to leave. Ever since his phone call promising to visit, Steve had felt like she was dancing on clouds.

“Cap, you’ve got a civilian approaching on your seven o’clock,” Hawkeye warned. “No obvious weaponry.”

“Copy that, Hawkeye,” Steve acknowledged, already turning when a hesitant voice called her name.

“Captain America? I mean, Captain Rogers? Sir?”

Completing her pivot, Steve saw a rail-thin man in his early twenties wearing a loose basketball jersey and crooked baseball cap. He looked nervous, side-eyeing the still sparking Doombot by Steve’s feet, but jogged closer when Steve gestured. “Can I help you, son?” Steve asked.

“I’m just a messenger, Sir, owed the Soldier a favor.” The kid held out a folded envelope in shaking fingers. “He said to _personally_ hand this over to Captain Rogers.”

“Who’s it from?” Steve asked, taking the envelope and unfolding it. Her name was scrawled on the front in Bucky’s familiar cursive. When she looked back up, the kid had disappeared.

“Guy skedaddled as soon as you looked down,” Hawkeye reported laconically. “Widow’s nearby if you need backup.”

“Thanks,” Steve said absently. Running her finger beneath the seal, she cracked open the envelope and pulled out the letter.

“The Fantastic Four seem to have everything under control. I’m bored. What’s the letter say?” Hawkeye pressed.

“Is it a love letter?” Black Widow asked with a teasing lilt in her voice.

Iron Man couldn’t help jumping on the line. “Wait, Rogers got a love letter? From whom?! Not Victor Von Doom, I hope. Not only will Reed be jealous, but I have tons more in common with Doom than Cap does! A shared love of engineering and robotics, for instance, and the ability to be a leader of a small nation!”

Black Widow snorted. “Seriously, Tony? Should Pepper be worried you’re going to throw her over for a supervillain who thinks fashion is wearing a slightly different shade of green cloak?”

Tuning out the rest of their banter, Steve read Bucky’s note.

 

  _Steve,_

_That last job of mine went south, but in good news, I think I found a way to get those trigger codes out of my head. No more murderbot on command. I had to commit to at least a month’s work in exchange for treatment, and then I need to teach some people what happens when you double-cross the Winter Soldier, but when you finally see me again, I should have a few new tricks up my sleeve besides the usual metal arm. I miss seeing your ugly mug more than anything, definitely more than I miss my old arm. No one in the world has a nose quite like yours. I’ve looked. Sorry I had to put off my visit, but I’ll come as soon as I’m safe._

_ Don’t mope! _

_See you when I see you,_

_Bucky_

 

Steve read through the letter twice more, but the message didn’t change.

Bucky wasn’t coming.

Something bad had happened on his last job. He might even be hurt. Yet even though Steve was ready and willing to drop everything to help, Bucky had decided to deal with it on his own. He didn’t need Steve’s help. Bucky didn’t need Steve.

Bucky wasn’t coming.

Steve crumpled the letter in her fist. The world went dark and cold. Her eyes stung. It felt like a tank had dropped on top of her chest and the treads were grinding her bones into powder. Everything hurt.

Suddenly the tone of teasing banter on the coms turned sharp and serious. Steve tuned back in to hear Hawkeye report, “A big Doombot just escaped towards Cap’s position, ETA thirty seconds. So far he’s shrugging off my arrows and I can’t get a better shot from my position up high. Iron Man’s pushing the other ‘bots back towards the Fantastic Four with Hulk.”

“They scatter quicker than kids hyped up on sugar,” Iron Man griped.

Dropping the letter to the ground, Captain America unstrapped her shield and jogged up the street. “Hold position, Hawkeye. I’ve got this.”

“Widow’s coming fast, should be there in a couple of minutes at most,” Hawkeye said.

A huge Doombot appeared around the intersection at that moment, green cloak flapping and metal eyes glinting evilly in the sun. It had to be fifteen feet tall and covered in metal plates. No way would that thing break with a single hit.

Perfect.

Lifting her gun, Cap emptied the clip into the Doombot and then threw it aside. Letting out a bellow of fury, she charged the Doombot, hitting it shield first with the force of a rhino. The Doombot crashed onto its back with a screech.

Before it could get back up, Cap leaped up to straddle its chest. The white star in the center of her shield reflected in the Doombot’s eyes as she slammed the shield into its face over and over. The optics finally cracked like a bag of dropped butterscotch candies.

Gripping her shield by the edge, she attacked the Doombot’s throat and shoulder joints. Sparks and caustic fluids burned her skin when the left arm sheared off beneath her blows. The remaining metal limbs bludgeoned her legs and back desperately.

When her shield became jammed in the Doombot’s neck without quite severing it, she simply turned to pummeling the metal monstrosity with her fists. Plates of metal bent and cracked even as her finger bones fractured. Peeling back the chest plate, she tore out electrical components with abandon, tossing them over her shoulder and ignoring the blood dripping from her shredded fingers and forearms.

Finally the Doombot stopped twitching and lay still between her thighs.

Someone grabbed her shoulder and yanked her off the robot. Raising her fists to counter the attack, she stopped her swing just in time when she saw the Black Widow’s familiar scarlet hair and black tac suit.

The Widow had her mouth open, shouting. Steve couldn’t hear a thing. She’d accidentally dialed her hearing down too low during the fight. Adjusting the volume back up, Steve winced as it became too loud.

“—eve, it’s me! Snap out of it!” Natasha looked a few seconds away from punching Steve across the face to bring her back to her senses. Steve used the Widow’s voice to adjust her hearing to a normal level.

Shrugging off Widow’s hand, Steve stepped back. “I’m fine. I’m fine!”

“You sure?” Black Widow asked warily. When Steve nodded curtly, she grunted and twisted her wrists, sliding the probes of her widow’s bite back into their sheaths. He hadn’t noticed that she’d been about to shock him. “What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing. The Doombot was a problem. I took care of it.”

Iron Man’s voice rang over the com. “Doom took off in a jet, taking his remaining Doombots with him. The battle’s over, Avengers, all but the cleanup. Scatter if you don’t want to get stuck picking up robot parts for the rest of the day and schmoozing with the Fantastic Four. I’ve got Bruce.”

“I’m coming down. Does Cap need medical?” Hawkeye asked.

Looking down, Steve saw that her arms from the elbow down looked like raw hamburger with a few strips of skin. It hurt, but she’d had worse. The serum would heal it, just like it did everything else, everything but a broken heart. “It’ll heal on its own,” Steve grunted. “I’m taking off.”

Natasha tried to block her way, but Steve swerved around her and kept on going.

Putting her hands on her hips, Nat called, “You hypocrite! At the very least, you should join us for our traditional post-battle meal.”

“Maybe next time,” Steve said, ducking around the corner and speeding into a jog towards where she’d parked her motorcycle. It would hurt to grip the handlebars, but she’d manage as long as the blood didn’t make it too slippery to steer. Then again, just because she was hurting didn’t mean she had the right to risk accidentally hurting someone else. Yanking open her saddlebags, she pulled out a roll of bandages and quickly wrapped up her arms.

“What’s up with him?” Hawkeye asked through the still open com in disbelief. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen Cap storm off after a battle.”

“He did what?” Tony asked in surprise.

“Is he okay?” Bruce’s tired voice sounded concerned, his voice travelling through Tony’s com.

“Something in that letter set him off,” Nat guessed. “Where’d it go? I think I saw him drop it.”

“Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?” Tony demanded.

“It blew into the gutter on the northeast side of the street by the yellow sign, Gollum,” Clint said.

Tony huffed. “I am not Gollum! That line is from Aragorn, the handsome king in exile and heroic leader!”

“Got it,” Natasha said with satisfaction. “Oh,” her tone dropped, becoming arctic and disapproving, “Barnes isn’t coming to visit Steve after all.”

Steve ripped the com out of her ear, unwilling to listen to her team discuss her pitiful pining over Bucky. Shoving her cowl off her head, she jerked on her helmet and leather jacket. They’d disguise the Captain America uniform and the bandages. She needed to be anonymous right now. Steve mounted her bike. Gunning the engine, she leaned low over the handlebars and sped away down the street. Focusing on the pain in her fingers, Steve tried to outrace the pain in her heart.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to get up. I had birthdays, cake orders (I'm a cake artist on the side), and then FanX 2018 Comic Convention in SLC, UT where I met Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor. They are still AMAZING and my love of Xena burns more strongly than ever! Chuck Norris, Karl Urban, Evangeline Lilly, and Manu Bennet were cool to see in panels too. Now onto the story!

 

Steve was doing just fine.

Everything was fine.

The team needed to stop bugging her about it, because she was FINE!

Sure, Steve hadn’t been sleeping well since Bucky’s letter saying he wasn’t visiting almost two months ago, and maybe her temper had gotten a bit shorter since, but she was fine. Bills got paid, bad guys got fought, and she was as healthy as ever. The library had let her renew twice, but finally Steve had been forced to return all of the books, DVDs, and boardgames she’d checked out for Bucky to avoid being labeled delinquent and fined. Steve never should have gotten her hopes up, but it was too late for regrets. Sure, Captain America took a few more risks here and there to get the job done, but no one could say that it wasn’t effective. It just felt like the only time she came alive lately was in the thick of a fight. The rest of the time everything felt muffled and gray.

But that was fine. It would pass. Steve would get over the disappointment. Life would go on—the serum gave her no choice in the matter. In the meantime, she’d keep saying she was fine until it was actually true.

And if Bucky wanted Steve to stop moping, he could come over here and say it to her face!

_Rat-ta-tat!_ A sharp knock at the door pulled Steve from the loaf of bread she’d been blankly staring at. A visitor sounded a lot more interesting than the eternal debate between meat and cheese or PB &J for lunch. Even opening the safety caps on Mr. Agarwal’s prozac bottles for the twentieth time would be preferable to eating lunch alone with her thoughts.

After wiping her hands clean on the kitchen towel by the stove and removing her apron, Steve opened the door and stared.

It was Bucky.

Bucky Barnes.

Bucky!

There’d been no warning whatsoever. Steve blinked, but the view didn’t change. Bucky really was standing on her welcome mat, alive and real and _here_.

Expanding her senses, Steve felt every nerve in her body spring to life with a cascading release of chemicals all dancing with the message, “ _Yes, finally..._.” Bucky both looked and smelled unfairly amazing. The vibrant sounds of his body felt like the color yellow. Distantly she noticed the large black duffle bag resting next to his booted feet and the plethora of weapons hidden on his person, but that all paled into smudges next to the bold reality of his presence on her doorstep.

Giving her a charming and hopeful smile, Bucky met Steve’s eyes. Although he looked confident and calm, she could hear his racing heartbeat jump even higher at the contact. The golden sunlight pouring through the window at the end of the hall caught him perfectly, a spotlight casting the rest of the world into shadow. Steve couldn’t help the way her eyes catalogued everything.

Bucky looked good, really good, the healthiest she’d seen him since before the War even. His skin was sun-kissed, his blue eyes clearer than a still pond, and his shoulders unbowed. Black cargo pants hugged his thighs and a gray t-shirt stretched across his muscled chest, his metal arm somehow camouflaged with a flesh-covered sleeve. His long, dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and glinted with dazzling copper highlights. She almost zoned on that copper glint alone. Her vision zoomed in on individual shafts of hair, healthy and smooth like the scales of a snake. Despite the danger, Steve blessed her Sentinel sight for allowing her to memorize even to the smallest level how Bucky looked at that exact moment, standing on her doorstep waiting for her.

As her silent stare dragged on, Bucky’s smile faltered and he rubbed nervously at the back of his neck. “Hiya, Stevie.”

Steve continued to stare at him in silence.

“So not a good surprise?” Bucky asked, smile turning awkward as he dropped his gaze and shuffled in place. “My brain’s fixed now, safe for Stevies everywhere.” He sent her a hopeful look from between his lashes.

“I’m mad at you,” Steve said flatly, grabbing desperately to her pride and self-preservation to keep from leaping at him, hitting him over the head like a cavewoman, and dragging him back into her den by the ankle. Besides, he hadn’t even apologized.

Bucky slumped, his head dropping to hide his expression. “Can I still come in?” Bending down, he grabbed the handles of his duffle, “Or do you want me to just stop bothering you and disappear?”

Since he was looking at his feet, Bucky didn’t see how his words affected Steve like a punch in the face.

“You—!” she snarled, at a loss for words. Her hand darted out to fist in his shirt, dragging him over the threshold. “Never!” she growled fiercely, shaking him hard. Steve blocked Bucky’s instinctive counterstrike with both elbow and foot, slammed his knife back into the sheath, blocked the swing of his duffle with her hip, and yanked him into a hug, slamming the door behind him with a kick so he was trapped inside.

Luckily he was also serum enhanced and could withstand the strength of her enthusiasm. Steve wasn’t holding back and a normal person would have a sprained or broken something. She buried her face into the warm curve of his shoulder and hugged him tighter.

Steve took a deep breath and felt almost drunk. His skin smelled better than the best dessert she’d ever tasted. “I want you in here next to me so I can be mad to your face, you idiot,” she mumbled, winding her hands into his shirt and turning her head into his neck so her lips grazed across his skin as she spoke.

Bucky gave a hitching sigh and relaxed into her hold, pressing his free hand to the sensitive curve in the small of her back and dropping his head. His movements vibrated through her skin and resonated in her bones. His body sounded like an orchestra: woodwinds to breathe air, percussion to pump heart and blood, strings for muscles and tendons, and brass for digestion—the sounds all harmonizing into the symphony of Bucky. She memorized each sensation, never wanting to forget.

It made Steve so grateful to be a Sentinel, to be able to know Bucky like this. Everywhere they touched felt deliciously warm and perfect. Steve wanted to stay like this forever.

Bucky dropped his duffle and wrapped both arms around Steve. The servos on his metal arm growled and whined, but Steve’s enhanced body revelled in the hard reality of his hold. “I missed you so much,” Bucky admitted softly, speaking against her hair, the warmth of his breath tickling her scalp.

Operating purely on instinct, all higher thought derailed by the euphoria of his presence, Steve opened her lips and licked up the strong and salty column of Bucky’s throat, pressing her tongue against the pulse kicking up violently in his neck, catching the racing heartbeat between her teeth and pressing tight, just shy of breaking the skin. She felt primitive and wild and fierce.

The taste of Bucky’s skin exploded on her tongue like a flash of lightning at midnight, exposing truths she’d hidden from for years. Steve didn’t want to be just friends. She wanted to protect and possess Bucky. She wanted to bite down, wanted to claim this man so everyone who saw the mark would know whom he belonged to and wouldn’t dare to flirt or covet or harm. All of her enhanced senses had twined around and through his body, a precursor to making him the center of her senses for the rest of their lives. She would never find another so perfectly matched. The urge to bond with him shivered through her. Steve wanted to mark Bucky as both a woman and a Sentinel and she didn’t want to have to apologize for any it.

Bucky jerked and gasped beneath her lips. His arms dropped and he froze, neither moving nor breathing. She couldn’t tell if he was just as turned on or... scared.

Wait, was she scaring him?

In a flash, Steve jerked away, face flaming. The pale indentations of her teeth on his neck slowly turned bright red as blood rushed back to the skin. The sheen of her saliva on his skin made it luminesce like mother of pearl. She had to wrench her eyes away and take a shaky step back.

What was she doing?

Steve could have hurt him. She could have ruined their friendship. It would have changed their relationship forever.  Steve wasn’t even a _real_ Sentinel, so she couldn’t blame it on the primitive instincts of unbonded Sentinels and Guides meeting.

Female instincts when pressed against an attractive male were a different boat altogether, but this had never happened before and she worked and wrestled with handsome men on a regular basis. She wasn’t an animal, to be driven by her passions. Steve was in control of herself.

Cursing silently, Steve took another step back and put her itching fingers behind her back, clenching them into fists and shoving on the mask of Captain America to give herself a second to breathe and regain self-control.

“Sorry about that. I don’t know what came over me.” Steve dug her fingernails into her palms to keep her voice from wavering at the lie. Coming to parade rest, she focused her gaze on the wall over his shoulder.

Bucky blinked rapidly and shook his head. Steve braced herself for a well-deserved dressing down.

Instead, Bucky began chuckling.

A vein in her temple started to throb.

He stopped laughing and met her eyes. Steve scowled. He looked way too amused. Pressing his lips together, Bucky’s twitching lips arched into a grin that burst open on a peal of laughter that grew and grew in both volume and delight.

Steve crossed her arms. She hated being laughed at. Setting her jaw, she waited for him to get it all out. Rushing him would just make it last longer.

Finally Bucky wound down and leaned back against the door to catch his breath. “Wow, I haven’t laughed like that since the early forties.” Expression going fond, he added, “I’ll start off by saying that you are completely forgiven and have permission to lick me whenever the mood takes you, Doll.”

“Be serious,” Steve grimaced.

“No, really,” Bucky grinned. “It’s nice to finally be on the receiving end of a proposition instead of throwing them out and always getting shot down like a German bomber flying over London.”

Confused, Steve tilted her head to the side and wandered over to stand by her kitchen table, grabbing onto the back of a chair to give her hands something to do. “What are you even talking about?”

“You punk, don’t even give me that,” Bucky said incredulously, straightening up from his slouch against the door. “I’m the one with memory problems, not you.”

“Look Bucky,” Steve said stiffly, “I was your best friend, but that was it. You exuded charm and flirtation like a fountain, but you never aimed it at me. I just got splashed occasionally because of proximity. Maybe that’s what you’re remembering.”

Bucky flung up his hands. “If I’m water then you were born with a raincoat on, but fine, let’s take a walk through the most embarrassing moments of my youth, shall we?”  

Unimpressed by his posturing, Steve arched one brow and crossed her arms.

Pacing through the living room, Bucky started counting off on his fingers, “Ever since we were kids, I followed after you like a lovesick puppy,” Steve scoffed, but Bucky just talked over it, “always begging you to play with me, hang out with me, even badgering you when your Ma passed to get you to live with me. I used to drag you on double-dates with other girls because you’d never agree to go on a date with just me. I got beat up at work for mooning after my male friend ‘Steve’,” he did air quotes, “until I broke a guy’s nose and won that big dance contest by partnering with both Brown twins at once, putting the rumors to rest.”

Steve uncrossed her arms and straightened. She remembered hearing about that fight, and Bucky clamming up and getting weird about it when she asked. Then he’d gone dancing every night for three weeks, barely sleeping, until he won that big dance contest with the twins.

Rolling his shoulders, Bucky glared at the quilt folded over the back of her couch. “I had to ambush you to get a single awkward kiss, and I used to be a great kisser that had to beat girls off with a stick.” He cast her a quick look and then turned away again.

“You wouldn’t even agree to marry me in name only when I was willing to give you everything, you were that uninterested. I gave up a free ticket home from the War just because you asked me to stay. Even Peggy Carter felt pity and warned me to keep my calf eyes in check because some of the new recruits were thinking of hauling me off for a private lesson, and she had you half-convinced to marry her after the War as Steve.”

Dragging in a ragged breath, he said, “Look Stevie, I spent my whole life throwing myself at your feet, only to have you not even notice as you stepped over my prone body, told me off for acting idiotic, and then called me a swell friend just before you dashed away to fight your next battle with or without me. Little or big, skirts or slacks, nothing ever changed the way I felt about you, the way I still feel about you!”

Cutting himself off, Bucky moved jerkily to look out the window, rubbing a shaking hand over his face. His camouflaged hand fisted at his side with a metallic grumble of shifting plates.

Plopping down into a chair before her knees gave out, Steve opened and closed her mouth soundlessly.

Every interaction she’d ever had with Bucky had just taken a sharp turn to the left and twisted upside-down. She’d never once believed Bucky had actually found her attractive, much less been serious with his attentions. Suddenly a lot of things made so much more sense. How had she been so blind?

And what should she say now?

“Bucky….” Scrambling for words, Steve was yanked from her thoughts by the blaring of her phone’s emergency alert. Grateful for the distraction, she lunged for the phone. “Hello?”

“Hey Rogers, the mad scientist with the lizard-skinned unicorns is back, this time in downtown Philly,” Tony said. “We’re coming to pick you up in the quinjet in less than five.”

Pivoting, Steve grabbed her shield and the go-bag in the closet holding her uniform and weapons. “I’ll meet you on the roof.” Hanging up the phone, she slotted a com into her ear with the other hand.

When she turned back, Bucky had his duffle bag unzipped on the table and was strapping holsters around his calves and thighs, filling them with a multitude of guns and knives.

“You sure you want to come with me? It’s not your fight,” Steve said.

Bucky snorted. “Oh please, I’ve been watching your back since I was in short pants, you punk. What else am I going to do, stay behind to shine your shoes? Though they do need it. You never do it right.”

Warmth filled Steve’s chest. “That’s only because I’m not as vain as you. I have better things to do than admire my reflection using my feet.”

Pulling out a second com, she tossed it to Bucky. He slotted it into his ear with alacrity and stripped off the skin-toned sleeve on his metal arm. Steve had to stop for a moment and stare. It was still strange to see metal plates instead of flesh, but also strangely beautiful. She wanted to draw it.

When her phone beeped, Steve jerked back into motion, clapping a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and jerked her head towards the door. “That’s our ride, Sergeant. Let’s go.” It took a surprising amount of effort to get her fingers to release the solid curve of his shoulder. She had the strongest urge to lock the door, turn off the phones, and wrap him up in a nest of blankets for at least a week.

“After you, Captain,” Bucky smirked, waving Steve out the door. He shrugged on his tac jacket and began doing up the multitude of buckles as they walked. Steve had a hard time keeping her eyes trained forward instead of watching the dance of his fingers, almost tripping on the stairs.

As they came out on the roof, the quinjet touched down with Hawkeye behind the windshield in the pilot’s seat. His eyes flicked across them and then widened in shock behind his sunglasses. It took Steve a moment to realize that Clint wasn’t focusing on Bucky, but on something behind them.

“That’s a hyena,” Clint announced through the com, deadpan.

Steve twisted to see her animal friend somehow sitting on the roof, a mystery for another time. “Oh, Joan? Yeah, she’s a hyena.”

Tony popped open the hatch and looked out. “I don’t see any hyena,” he groused. His expression flattened with displeasure when he spied Bucky. “Just Scar, who finally took time out of his busy backstabbing calendar to visit.”

“Joan’s standing next to a white wolf,” Clint added helpfully.

Sure enough, the wolf from Steve’s dream was there too.  

Twisting his head over his shoulder, Clint called back into the cabin, “Definitely not a spotted dog, Nat. You owe me twenty bucks and a penalty in sparring!”

“What nonsense are you even spouting?” Tony demanded in exasperation, craning his neck to look around the roof. “Also, may I remind you that there are scaly unicorns rampaging through Philly as we speak?”

“Maybe they’re looking for a good cheese steak,” Bucky drawled as he and Steve boarded the jet and sat down. The hatch hissed closed. The jet lifted into the air and sped away.

Everyone stared at them.

Steve cleared her throat. “Everyone, this is my friend Bucky,” she said inadequately, unsure how else to describe him, knowing that the word friend was true but much weaker than whatever they really were to each other.

“I don’t think unicorns appreciate a good cheese steak.” Natasha greeted neutrally. Leaning back in her seat, she crossed her legs seductively and minutely pouted her lips, drawing attention to her curves and away from the hard light in her eyes and the fingers resting millimeters away from her gun. “Did you come Online as a Guide since the last time we met or are my senses deceiving me?”

“I would never contradict a lady, especially one trained as a Black Widow,” Bucky answered smoothly.

Natasha’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly at his non-answer. Interestingly, Bucky seemed to notice the tell too. It had taken Steve over a year as her teammate to even start seeing Natasha’s subtle signals.

Bucky’s eyes turned distant and his words slowed. “However, I suspect I’ve been a very different person every time we’ve met.”

Natasha inclined her head in response and relaxed back, getting more from that mysterious answer than Steve had.

Impatient at being ignored, Tony dramatically stomped into the center of the cabin in his Iron Man suit. “Are we actually trusting the Winter Soldier to guard our backs? The brainwashed assassin?”

Steve pulled on her Captain America gear and let Bucky answer that one himself, curious as to what he’d say.

“Excuse me,” Bucky interrupted fearlessly, “but that’s _formerly_ brainwashed assassin. I got fixed—the brainwashing, not the assassin part. I still kill people who deserve it for the right price. Have _you_ been a good boy lately, Stark?” He smirked, strumming his fingers over his weapons as he flicked his eyes up and down Tony in his Iron Man suit.

Tony clenched his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and powered up his hand repulsors with a whine of servos and a flood of bright white light.

“Now Bucky,” Steve said in her most earnest voice, widening her eyes and trying to defuse the tension, “if you and Tony are going to be friends, the first thing you should know is that Tony prides himself on _never_ being a good boy.”

Clint chuckled over the com and even Natasha cracked a smile.

Bruce cautiously cleared his throat from the back. “Look, if you guys don’t want me going green and bursting out of the jet before we even get to Philly, you’re going to need to tone down the arguing.”

Tony immediately powered down his repulsors and assumed a casual stance.

“Fine by me,” Bucky said in an easy tone of voice that didn’t quite fool Steve. He swivelled his chair, turning away from Iron Man to face Bruce. “I don’t think we’ve met yet. James Barnes, Winter Soldier and former Army Sergeant, at your service.”

“Dr. Bruce Banner AKA the Hulk and it’s nice to finally meet you. I know Steve holds you in very high regard.”

“The feeling’s mutual, Doc,” Bucky said with a charming smile, keeping Tony in his peripheral vision but otherwise ignoring him.

Giving an exasperated huff, Tony dropped down into a seat and sprawled as much as his metal suit allowed. “Fine, welcome to the party, bondage Barbie.”

At Steve’s look of confusion, Tony explained. “Because all of the leather straps. No one needs that many straps unless they’re getting kinky later.”

Turning to Bruce, he added, “Though Steve is probably too innocent to know much about being kinky, despite my efforts.”

Bruce gave a slight smile and shrugged. “We can’t know that for sure. After all, Steve did draw pinup girls back in the day.”

“True, who can forget the delectable garter-belt Jamie.” Tony leered, flicking his eyes over to Steve’s artistic inspiration: Bucky.

Unfazed, Bucky raised one eyebrow. “I’m too much man or woman for you, Stark. Not even in your dreams.”

“Oh really,” Tony riposetted, eyes narrowing in challenge.

Interrupting from the cockpit, Clint called out in a boyish voice, “Oh please, Sir! I’m too young and innocent to hear about any of Mr. Stark’s dirty dreams!” Over the chuckles of his teammates, Clint added in a normal voice, “But considering how crazy this crew is, we can always use more eyes in the sky. Welcome to the Avengers, Barnes.”

Steve clapped her hands. “Okay everybody, Bucky, callsign Winter Soldier, is an expert in both ranged and close combat. Bucky, this is Black Widow, Iron Man, Hulk, and Hawkeye up front. Like Hawkeye suggested, I think the Winter Soldier could best be used as another sniper and lookout. I’m going to assign him to help Hulk and Widow take out the scientist for good this time while Iron Man, Hawkeye, and I try to contain the unicorns.”

Bucky didn’t look too pleased to be assigned away from Steve, but besides a single sharp look he didn’t argue with the order.

“I’ve got a sweet sniper rifle Barnes can borrow in my weapons locker,” Hawkeye offered. “It’s barely seen any use and has to be more powerful than anything he could fit in that little rucksack.”

As Nat went to retrieve the gun, Bucky said, “You’d be surprised, but thanks. I’ll take you up on that as long as you’re sure you won’t need it.”

“No way. For hunting unicorns, arrows are definitely the traditional way to go,” Hawkeye said pretentiously. “Besides, arrows are just way cooler than guns,” his voice changed to a professional tone, “a-a-n-nd here we go, coming up on downtown Philly in five minutes.”

Everyone checked their weapons and armor one more time as the quinjet began its descent.   


  



	10. Chapter 10

 

As the Avengers exited the quinjet in Philadelphia, Agent Higginson came out of the pop-up command center, turned his back to them for a brief moment, and then strode out to meet them.

“Did you see that?” Hawkeye asked incredulously, pausing with half his body dangling out of the quinjet. “When he saw us land, he totally pulled out a bottle of that foul cologne and drenched himself in it. I knew he was doing it on purpose!”

“Still nothing we can do about it,” Steve sighed as the cloud of stench reached her a full block before the agent in question.

Clint hopped out and shut the quinjet door more forcefully than necessary. “What about Febreze? We could spray him at the start of every conversation to eliminate the odor. I’m sure Tony could make me special arrows just for the job.”

For a moment Steve considered it, but she knew the pesky man would escalate and make it more difficult for the Avengers to do their job in the long run. “No Febreze arrows,” she said regretfully.

Natasha took one whiff and veered off to interrogate one of the other agents, leaving Steve to deal with Higginson herself.

“I hope you Avengers are going to actually stop the perp this time, Captain Rogers,” Higginson sneered. “You’d think a fake Sentinel and two partials funded by a billionaire would be capable of tracking down one mad scientist, but here we are. Again.”

Philadelphia’s heat and humidity had made Higginson’s face go bright red. Rings of sweat darkened the pits and chest of his white button-down shirt. The overpowering stench of his cologne mixed with sour sweat made the inside of Steve’s nose convulse with the need to crawl away into a hole and die.

“That’s the plan,” Steve said evenly, breathing shallowly and only holding onto her temper by reminding herself that Higginson was a petty, pitiful, and small man. She was already tense because of Bucky and this was just making the stretched feeling behind her eyes worse. “What’s the situation?”

Agent Higginson gestured them over to a table holding a map where Black Widow already stood. The rest of the team followed. Turning her head, Steve had to pause for a moment at the strange rightness of seeing the Winter Soldier in his mask and goggles, metal arm gleaming in the sun, standing between Black Widow and Hawkeye. It undid a few of the knots in her shoulders.

Then Agent Higginson elbowed his way in next to them, lifting his arm to point out the locations on the map and wafting his rank stench in Steve’s direction. Her eyes stung. Two tears escaped to run down the edges of Steve’s mask. Steve pressed her lips tight in irritation.

The Winter Soldier tensed as Higginson circled the table and jostled him with a pompous wave of his hand, going still in a way that made Steve worried Bucky was about to stick a knife in Higginson and get the team into trouble with the governor (though it would probably endear Bucky to the other Avengers quicker than anything else he’d done so far). After a tense moment, Bucky let the obnoxious FBI agent circle the table without trouble.

Steve breathed deeply of the cleaner air in the few seconds it took Higginson to circle back, focusing on Bucky’s fresh scent to clear her sinuses.

Bucky shifted forward slightly, his arms surreptitiously touching both Hawkeye and Black Widow. It looked like a protective move. The touching made Steve almost do a double-take, it was so unexpected. Even stranger, no one jerked away. In fact, Steve’s teammates seemed to relax and shift so the touch became firmer.

Although Steve’s nose itched furiously as Higginson leaned on the table next to her, she noticed that her nose and eyes had settled into grimly unhappy instead of a steadily dripping bog of misery. Her two partial Sentinels didn’t seem to be having the usual trouble either. Their rashes and runny noses were missing, though not their sour expressions.

Steve suddenly remembered Natasha’s question to Bucky on the quinjet about coming Online as a Guide. Steve had dismissed it at the time, too discombobulated by Bucky’s appearance, but maybe it was true. Maybe Bucky was using Online Guide gifts to keep the senses of Steve’s teammates balanced. Steve herself was keeping a portion of her senses tuned to him at all times like a love-struck puppy, but she could only sense so much without touching him like the others were.

Ugly jealousy and stark longing swirled in her heart, but she ruthlessly suppressed it. Steve had a job to do. After the unicorns were kicked back into mythology and the scientist sent to prison, then she could figure out what to do with Bucky being here, attracted to her, and a Guide. She wanted it all, wanted all of him, but a part of her feared that it was too good to be true, that she hadn’t earned it, didn’t deserve it. Steve was terrified he’d be taken away from her again just when she almost had it all.

Clearing his throat pretentiously, Higginson yanked her attention back to the situation. He lifted his chin, trying to make himself taller than Steve and failing. “The mad scientist—whom we just figured out is a woman named Dr. Dana Parcheesi after she threatened to destroy Philadelphia with her unicorn army unless we gave her $50 million and cancelled NSF grants to all of the bioengineering departments in the Midwest—is located here,” he pointed.

“Dr. Parcheesi’s already released several semi-trucks full of those unicorn creatures to show she’s serious. Using a control device, she made the unicorns perform a Riverdance routine in lockstep and then hunted down and trampled a SWAT team not five minutes later. From the last incident, we learned that the creatures she created can’t survive more than forty-eight hours before system failure sets in. Unfortunately, we can’t wait that long.”

“We’re lucky it’s not a weekend, but summer is still tourist season. We’ve evacuated as many people as we could from the area and cordoned it off, but we know we missed some. A lot of cops and civilians have already been hurt by those creatures. The nearest hospitals are almost at capacity, so we’re shipping the less urgent cases farther away. The Governor’s declared a state of emergency.”

Higginson cleared his throat and pointed to several markers on the map, “We’ve used traffic cameras and drones to mark all of the semi-trailers in the affected area. Some of the trailers haven’t been opened yet, but we can’t get to them to lock them down because those vicious unicorns are roaming the streets and they cut through my men like tissue paper. When we take out one herd, another trailer opens somewhere to restore the numbers. The locals aren’t equipped for this and the army is still en route. That’s why we need you.”

Nodding decisively, Steve straightened up and turned to her team. “Okay Avengers, Black Widow and Winter Soldier on the scientist, with Hulk to take out the herds outside the lair and batter down the door. Once you get the device she’s using to control the unicorns, stand the herds down and direct them back into the trailers if you can. If you need technical help, call in Iron Man. Until then, the rest of us will work to contain the unicorns on the streets.”

Once Steve made sure everyone had acknowledged the orders without argument—an important step when leading the Avengers—she waved them off, “Move out.”

Steve avoided Bucky’s unhappy gaze at not being able to watch her back, knowing it was cowardly but unable to help herself. She needed to calm down and focus on the upcoming battle. Nothing about Bucky made her feel calm right now and all she wanted to focus on was him. Captain America would get spitted by a unicorn if she wasn’t careful. She had a duty to uphold.

As Black Widow, a green-flushed Bruce Banner, and the Winter Soldier turned to go, Iron Man called out, “Hey Bruce, I know the big guy likes sports movies. You better make sure Dr. Parcheesi and her unicorns don’t destroy the Rocky statue in front of the Philly Museum of Art.”

At the mention of his boxing hero, the gigantic green Hulk surged out of Bruce with an angry roar. “Hulk smash unicorns! Protect Rocky!”

Walking backwards, Widow sent Iron Man a _look_. “I bet you like that statue more than the actual art inside the museum.”

“Who says Rocky isn’t fine art?” Tony defended, closing his faceplate.

“City officials,” Widow answered dryly, “who labelled it a mere movie prop.”

“Pshh! I leave questions of taste to Pepper,” he said dismissively. “Though if Rocky does get smashed, maybe I can get them to replace it with a statue of Iron Man?”

“Protect Rocky!” Hulk roared again, baring his big teeth at Iron Man.

“Or not,” Iron Man said, holding up his hands peaceably. “My statue would look better in New York anyway. They love me there,” he zoomed up into the air, “as they should.”

Hulk picked up Black Widow in one large green hand and, after a moment of hesitation on both their parts, the Winter Soldier in the other. Turning, Hulk bounded away to catch the evil scientist and keep the Rocky Statue safe. Within seconds, the three had disappeared down a side street.

Unfortunately, Sentinel vision still couldn’t see through buildings and downtown had too many strong scents and sounds to keep track of Bucky’s presence. The fight had barely started and Steve had lost Bucky again. She missed him already and only had herself to blame. Duty felt like cold company right now.

Agent Higginson wiped a hand over the back of his neck and then clapped Steve’s shoulder, leaving a damp handprint reeking of sour sweat and gag-inducing cologne. Steve swallowed hard. Bucky’s leaving made it harder for her to ignore the awful smell.

“Try and actually finish the job this time, will ya?” Higginson ordered condescendingly.

Skin prickling and crawling beneath her suit at the touch, Steve quickly stepped away, wishing she had a handkerchief to wipe him off. “Why don’t you just worry about doing your job, Agent?” She snapped with more bite than she usually allowed herself. “Protect the civilians and keep those unicorns from breaking through your barricades. My team will take care of what you can’t.” Turning her back on his sputtering, Steve took off with Iron Man and Hawkeye.

Iron Man zipped forward into the first herd like a flashy bowling ball. However, the herd scattered around him and reformed, only a couple of them even injured. “Looks like our villain took the bioengineering up a notch. We now have armadillos crossed with unicorns. Their skins are a lot tougher this time and plated,” Iron Man reported, blasting his repulsors at the eyes of the creatures to turn them away from a group of civilians running for the police barricades.

Shooting arrows rapid-fire, Hawkeye mused, “What would that mix even be called? A unidillo? An armacorn?”

Boosting one of the scaly unicorns into the air, Iron Man dropped it on top of another, taking them both out in a meaty crunch. “Unidillo sounds like a sex toy and armacorn like something you’d eat at the circus.”

An arrow thudded into the eye socket of the unicorn on Steve’s left, causing it to rear back and expose its vulnerable throat. Darting forward, Steve collapsed its trachea with a hard slam of her shield, then twirled to duck under another’s teeth and kneecap it. “Did you ever eat armacorn while in the circus, Hawkeye?” she asked, not yet winded.

“Not that I remember,” he answered through the twang of his bowstring, “but if I did, it was probably named after you and colored red, white, and blue.” Hawkeye’s voice took on the tone of a circus barker. “Come and get your Armacorn! The favored popcorn of Sentinel Super Soldier Captain America!”

“Well that does it,” Iron Man announced, “now I want some. After we kill all these armacorns, let’s go get some popcorn, the gourmet fruity kind in bright colors. It’ll even serve Steve’s crunchy food fetish. Jarvis, find us a shop in Philly to buy popcorn, will you?”

“Of course, Sir,” Jarvis acknowledged as they finished decimating another herd of creatures.

“Heads up,” Widow’s voice broke into the com. “Some of the unicorns now have wings.”

“Copy that,” Steve said, craning her neck to look up at the sky.

Hawkeye cleared his throat. “I see a flock approaching from the south, Captain. Do we call them pegasus or armasus? Armapegs? No, we should definitely stick with pegasus, the other names just sound stupid.”

“The plural is pegai,” Steve offered, something she’d learned from a recent library book.

“That sounds stupid too. I’m sticking with pegasus as I shoot them.” Iron Man hovered above the street in readiness. “If only I was a six-year old girl, this day would make all my dreams come true,” he lisped dramatically, pirouetting in the air.

“You dreamed of killing unicorns and pegai, I mean pegasus as a six-year old?” Steve teased, jumping up onto a car to get a better view of the fliers coming in fast.

“My father was an international arms dealer and my mother bought me lots of gifts while drunk. My eclectic toy collection often met grisly ends,” Tony answered with aggressive cheerfulness.

“Excuse me, Sirs,” Jarvis interrupted, “but trucks on both sides of your position have opened to disgorge more of the ground creatures you’re calling armacorns. They’re rapidly approaching from both east and west.”

“Iron Man, take east. I’ll do west. Hawkeye, stay high and try to keep those pegasus off us for as long as you can,” Steve ordered, taking up position with her shield and pulling out her largest caliber gun. Just as well she’d packed more guns than usual after Bucky had given her a searing look in the quinjet on seeing her usual armament.

The next ten minutes passed in a blur of hooves, horns, and crunching bones as Steve fought to contain the deadly creatures. They were harder to kill or disable than the last time, but that only slowed Captain America down. It didn’t stop her. Dodging the occasional pegasus body falling from the sky embedded with arrows just added an extra zing to the battle.

Annoyingly, Steve’s shoulder still itched from Higginson’s unpleasant palm print and she had trouble smelling much over the rank cologne. It made it harder to rely on her extra senses. The lack of sleep and worry over Bucky meant her concentration wasn’t great either. She’d been poked with horns and bitten a few times already.

Chasing the last of the armacorns away from a car full of cowering civilians, she followed it around a corner and leapt forward, crushing its spine with a blow from the edge of her shield. The rest of the street looked deserted. “Black Widow, Winter Soldier, what’s the status on our mad scientist?” Steve asked over the com, turning in a circle to look for more foes.

“We’re facing heavier than expected resistance,” Black Widow answered with cool irritation. Something squished unpleasantly on her end, sounding like an exploding watermelon.

“But we’ve got her trapped. That scientist isn’t leaving, not on a flying pegasus or a jet plane,” Bucky added, the percussive pop of his gun sounding in the background.

“Was that a song reference?!” Tony gasped, a thread of real strain in his voice.

Widow ignored him to add, “Hulk should finish smashing the unicorns soon and start breaking down the door. If you’re bored, feel free to join us, but otherwise we have it under control. It’s only a matter of time until we have her.”

Steve nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I could—”

“Belay that, Rogers,” Hawkeye called frantically. “There’s a school bus two blocks south of your position with kids still inside.” Steve immediately started running. “The bus is orange, says Summit Academy in large letters. You can’t miss it. Iron Man’s pinned down protecting a nail salon, so it’s all on you.”

“Needed a manicure,” Iron Man grunted, obviously pushing himself hard.

Hawkeye continued, “I’m doing what I can, but the angle is awkward and the pegasus just keep coming so I can’t shift position to get closer. Armacorns are kicking at the back of the bus, trying to get inside. The sound seems to be drawing more of them from the surrounding streets. Hurry Cap.” The sound of his bow firing rapidly strummed urgently through the com.

Steve sprinted around the corner, all her protective instincts engaged. Childish screams and sobs resonated in her ears as she cranked up her Sentinel hearing. She turned just in time to see an armacorn stallion—bigger than a draft horse and covered with matte white scales that sucked in the light and flat black eyes crowned by a long, sharp silver horn—kick open the back door of the orange school bus over a block away and stomp it loose with his hooves.

The armacorn herd gave a chorus of eerie neighs and violent bugles as they crowded closer to the bus.

Steve ran faster. The thought of seeing little broken bodies made her want to scream in denial and rage, but she needed the breath to push her body harder. Muscles burned, the world blurred, but at her fastest she was still too slow.

The children’s screams reached a fever pitch as the stallion thrust his head into the hole in the back of the bus and snapped it aggressively from side to side. Steve couldn’t see if any of the children had been hit. The creature got his front haunches up into the doorway and lifted a back foot to surge forward into the bus.

Abruptly the armacorn jerked, lost his balance, and stumbled back out of the bus onto his rump on the street outside.

Out of the shadows of the bus burst a young man fiercely brandishing a makeshift weapon.

Feeling a surge of vertigo when the teen lifted his head and bared his teeth in challenge, Steve almost tripped and went flying forward. The boy wore a white button-down shirt and navy slacks held up by suspenders. With his brown hair slicked down and dimpled chin thrust forward like an avenging angel, he looked exactly like a seventeen-year-old Bucky Barnes kicking the stuffing out of Steve’s latest bully.

So it came as a horrible shock when the stallion surged to his feet and rammed his three foot long horn through the boy’s side with a meaty thud, ripping it back out with a slurp and spray of scarlet blood.

Bucky fell.

Steve threw her shield, cursing herself for not throwing it earlier and barely staving off hysteria. The shield cleaved through the stallion’s throat and dropping him to the ground, but it was too late.

Young voices wailed and sobbed.

Steve was too late and he fell. He fell and she’d failed him.

Again.

Red blood soaked young Bucky’s white shirt in a damning tide, until the whole world turned to shades of crimson, ruby, and wine. The sharp smell of blood coated her nose until she could smell nothing else, not even the cologne anymore. Bucky’s wet gasp and cry of pain savaged her heart like a sawblade.

The screams of the children grew louder as more enemies approached from the air and galloped nearer on the street. They’d hurt, perhaps killed Bucky. They’d threatened the children.

Everything crystallized. She would not let anyone hurt these children again. No one. She stood sentinel to bar the way and would fight to protect them with the last drop of blood in her body. Her senses went sharply acute, even as her mind snapped under a tide of protective and vindictive RAGE.


	11. Chapter 11

“Not good, not good!” Clint cried as he spun in place, shooting arrows through eyes and wing-joints as fast as possible.

A dead man sprawled out on the street below. He’d run out of a building with his friends and been kicked in the head by a diving pegasus, caving in his skull. His two friends huddled under a nearby car, sobbing.

“How much longer on that scientist, Widow? Cap just went crazy when a Bucky look-alike got gored in the school bus and we’re being overwhelmed out here! You need to shut down the mind-control on these things!”

Catching a pegasus with a net-arrow, Hawkeye sent it plummeting down onto two more, tangling their wings and making the trio crash to the street with a meaty crunch. “Either that or send me a Disney princess to distract them.” A new flock of pegasus burst out of a trailer parked in an alley down the street and flapped into the air, making his heart drop. He reached back, but his fingers only found one arrow.

He was screwed.

“The target’s barricaded herself at the end of this hall. We’ve almost got her,” Black Widow snapped. “Hang on and try singing songs about love and friendship.”

“Sure, singing.” Clint clenched his thighs on the narrow ledge of the building, leaned out as far as possible, and shot his last arrow at the armacorn charging with its head lowered before it could flip the car sheltering the surviving civilians and trample them to death. Clint’s arrow sank into the center of its chest and exploded, sending body parts flying into the armacorns following close behind, taking out two more and injuring a third. “I’m out of arrows. Shifting to handguns now.”

Hulk’s angry roar echoed through the city streets along with a dull boom, hopefully the sound of them finally taking out the scientist. Clint fired a full clip into the armacorns below, taking out the last of them. Two more pegasus swooped by as he was reloading.

Iron Man blasted past Clint’s position. “I’ve got Rogers and the school bus.” He shot down the two pegasus in the sky, granting Hawkeye a breather.

As Clint reloaded, he let himself sigh since no one was there to see it. Handguns sucked compared to arrows.

Using his Sentinel eyesight, Clint found Rogers several blocks away, standing sentinel in front of a school bus in the midst of a mound of equine-shaped bodies. Cap’s uniform was in tatters, the hood and sleeves completely missing and the stars and stripes on his torso obscured by dirt and bodily fluids, hopefully of his enemies and not his own. Bloody gouges covered his skin, one eye was swollen shut, and his hair was matted with blood.

A normal man would be unconscious or dead, but Rogers was still fighting. Three armacorns circled him warily. Baring bloody teeth at them, Cap produced a high-pitched, hair-raising laugh. When one of the armacorns got too close, Cap jumped forward, wrapping his arms around its neck and wrenching, snapping its spine. Rogers ignored the teeth clamping down brutally onto his leg as if he didn’t even feel the pain.

Iron Man arrived on the scene with a _boom_ of braking repulsors. Firing a small missile, he blasted the remaining two armacorns into hamburger. “Never fear, Iron Man’s here!” Retracting his faceplate, he trotted towards the kids on the bus, calling over his shoulder, “You okay there, Rogers?”

Leaping forward, Cap slammed his bloody palms against Iron Man’s suit, sending Tony flying halfway down the street. The suit’s faceplate snapped closed as Iron Man skidded to a stop and rolled back to his feet.

“What the hell was that for?” Iron Man snarled, stomping forward, cracking the pavement beneath his feet with his temper. Clint felt equally confused.

Why had Cap attacked Iron Man? Was he concussed from that head wound? Had the armacorn bites infected him somehow?

Watching Iron Man’s approach with animal wariness, Roger’s eyes showed no recognition. Cap limped forward to place himself squarely between Tony and the kids on the school bus, lowered his head, raised his fists threateningly, and cackled tauntingly. Tony’s approach faltered.

At some point, Cap had lost his shield. Clint could see two discarded guns and three broken knives on the nearby battleground. Even disarmed and bloody, Rogers was an intimating sight. Clint wouldn’t want to fight him unless he had to. The voice of Clint’s hindbrain whispered to either run away fast or join the Sentinel in the fight. It was strange.

The whole thing was strange and made something in the back of Clint’s mind itch, as if he knew the answer but had merely forgotten it.

“Captain Rogers? Hello? Anyone in there? This is your friendly neighborhood Iron Man.” Tony tried to circle around, but Cap matched him pace for pace. “You know I’m trying to get those kids out of here to safety and medical attention. Work with me here.”

Iron Man took a step forward.

Eyes narrowing, Rogers snatched up a broken armacorn horn and threw it at Tony like a spear. Blasting into the air in a corkscrew, Iron Man barely dodged. Metal shrieked as the horn scoured his chest plate. When Cap rolled and came up holding a gun with armor piercing rounds, Iron Man retreated a few blocks away.

“Has Rogers gone crazy?” he exclaimed.

“What’s happening with Steve?” the Winter Soldier harshly demanded over the com.

“Keep typing,” Black Widow snapped.

“Fine,” Barnes growled. “The scientist is dead, caught a lungful of the poison gas she was trying to use on us. I’m working on the mind-control machine, but we might need Iron Man’s help to crack it. Widow thinks it uses a combination of sound waves, pheromones, and radio signals sent to embedded microchips in the creatures. She can sense the first two now that she’s looking for ‘em, but not the last, much good it does us.”

“Hawkeye, keep an eye on Rogers,” Iron Man ordered as he rocketed away.

“Why? What’s going on?” Barnes demanded again.

Iron Man answered before Clint could. “Rogers looks messed up. He isn’t talking and attacked me when I tried to evac the kids he was guarding. What good is being a fake Sentinel if he can’t even sense his own teammates? Maybe Rogers took a knock to the head after we split up that the serum hasn’t healed yet, I don’t know.”

“You split up and left Steve alone?” Too bad Barnes could type and argue at the same time. The Winter Soldier sounded violent. It was probably a good thing Tony wasn’t there yet.

“He’s not a helpless child,” Tony snapped. “In fact, he was needed to defend a group of helpless children, which he did. Being part of a team means knowing each other’s strengths and trusting them to handle things on their own, but an assassin wouldn’t know about that, not being either a team player or trustworthy.”

Barnes snorted derisively. “I know more than you ever will. They would’ve drummed you out of the army in basic, Stark. The only reason you’re on this team is because you’re rich and people with real training compensate for your weaknesses.”

Tony blew a gasket, but Clint was too busy to pay much attention.

Cocking his head to the side as he watched Steve’s strange behavior, Clint finally figured out the itch in his brain. It made Clint question everything he knew about Steve and his mysterious hyena. It should be impossible, but the evidence before his eyes seemed overwhelming. “Um, guys?” Clint interrupted. “I think Steve’s gone _Feral_.”

There was a beat of silence on the com and then Tony blurted out, “You mean like Ripley in _Aliens_?”

“I mean _Feral_ like the stories of female Sentinels protecting children and mates,” Clint said, watching as Steve paced slowly around the bus full of children, leaving a trail of dripping blood that diminished with each pass, but still looked worrisome.

Tony sputtered. “How is that possible? Rogers isn’t even a real Sentinel. Erskine’s serum and my dad’s Vitaray machine made him that way. Plus, there’s the whole being-a-man thing. Rogers can’t be Feral. The possibility is astronomically low!”

“Either way, he’s gonna bleed to death if someone doesn’t get him to slow down and bandage those wounds,” Clint said unhappily, “not to mention the injured kid in the bus who needs medical attention stat.”

“I’ll go,” Nat said. “Female Sentinels are supposed to be safe from other Sentinels going Feral.”

“If it doesn’t infect you too,” Clint argued protectively. “Then we’d have two of you attacking people.”

“I’ll go,” Barnes said insistently.

“No!” Nat snapped. “You need to keep working on that system until Iron Man gets here so the rest of those creatures stop attacking people. You’re having more luck with the operating system than I am. It’s what Cap would want.”

Barnes grunted unhappily.

After that, Clint got distracted picking off more pegasus and armacorns with his dinky handgun. Down on the ground, Natasha finally came roaring up on a motorcycle, as if there’d been any doubt she’d win the argument to come. Considering Clint’s track record, he didn’t give anyone good odds on that front, except maybe Phil Coulson, their old handler at SHIELD. Coulson’s absence was still a sore spot for both of them.

Kicking her leg over the motorcycle, Nat put her hands up in the air and slowly walked towards Rogers and the children. Steve seemed surprised to see her. He lowered the gun, but didn’t move out of the way.

“As a fellow Sentinel, I’m here to get those children to safety,” Nat said calmly. “I’m here to protect and to help. I promise to guard them with my life, but they aren’t safe here. Please, Steve, let me help them. Let me help you.”

Their eyes met and a silent message passed between them. Natasha stumbled, swaying on her feet.

Clint shot to his feet, heart in his throat as he considered taking the dangerous but efficient path down the side of the building to reach her as quickly as possible. Nat was his everything, whether they were together romantically or not. He couldn’t let her be hurt or brainwashed if there were any possible way for him to stop it.

One leg already swung over the side of the building in preparation to jump, Clint saw Nat straighten her back and lower her hands to her sides. “I’m fine,” she called, sending him their private hand signal. Clint jerked to a stop, waiting tensely over the high drop.

“Thank you,” Nat said simply, lowering her head to Steve. “I understand.”

Turning, she walked fearlessly past Rogers and climbed up into the back of the school bus. He didn’t stop her, instead pacing along at her back, keeping a wary eye on the street while she was distracted with the hysterical children. Clint didn’t make the mistake of thinking the rest of them would be granted the same immunity.

Inside the bus, Natasha calmed and organized the children, bandaging the gored and unconscious Bucky-look-alike with supplies in her belt pouch. She tried to treat Rogers, but he refused, instead reaching for the wounded boy with a mournful cry and pulling him gently into his arms.

Pressing her lips flat for a split second, Nat’s face returned to calm and controlled as she focused on herding the rest of the children. She helped everyone out of the bus and then took off with the group towards the police barricade down the street. Rogers limped in the rear, cradling his precious burden. At least he’d finally stopped bleeding.

“She did it,” Clint announced into the com shakily. “They’re heading for the nearest police exit.”

“I’ve informed the authorities to be ready to receive them,” Jarvis said helpfully.

Clint kept an eye on the group, shooting a pegasus that flew too close. He was almost out of bullets. A few blocks away, Hulk’s big green form appeared, swatting pegasus from the sky like flies and gleefully chased down armacorns.

Finally the group reached the barricade to a cheering crowd of first responders. The children who could ran for it, getting snatched up and handed back into blankets and the line of waiting ambulances. They brought over a stretcher for the boy in Roger’s arms, but Cap wouldn’t let them get close, growling at anyone who tried and baring his teeth menacingly.

Face set, Nat knelt at Steve’s side and whispered into his ear for a full minute, too quietly for the coms to pick up. Hearing wasn’t one of Clint’s Sentinel talents, so he was frustratingly lost. Head drooping, Rogers finally passed his precious burden into Nat’s arms. Standing up, she walked the pale boy past the stretcher and straight into one of the waiting ambulances, laying him down carefully.

Rogers threw back his head and keened. The sound made Clint wince. Staggering to his feet, face white and eyes dead, Rogers turned and ran back into the battle, likely following sounds of the Hulk. When he turned a corner too fast, Rogers tripped and fell, reopening his wounds and scattering blood drops like rain for the next block as he ran until his healing could catch up with it again.

Nat’s urgent voice came over the com, “The EMT said she thinks the boy will live, barring any unforeseen complications. The horn missed most of his vital organs.” Natasha climbed out of the ambulance and stared down the street after where Rogers had gone. “Did you hear me, Steve? The boy is going to live.”

Rogers didn’t answer.

“Steve, that wasn’t Bucky. Bucky’s fine. He’s with Tony,” Nat said insistently, breaking into a run to catch up with Cap before he got himself killed.

Rogers pressed his hands to the sides of his head and rubbed hard, dislodging his com. He keened again and turned to engage with an armacorn.

“I’m almost there,” Barnes called over the com. “Where’s Steve?”

“Following in Hulk’s wake, trying to find something to punch,” Clint said, spinning around and using his Sentinel vision to catch the Winter Soldier’s approach. The man was a machine, running and jumping from roof to roof in a steady progression. “Go straight for two more buildings and then hang right for one more. Look down and you should see Rogers as he passes by. His com is gone. There’s still pegasus lurking and I’m on my last clip, so stay wary, but I’ll try to keep an eye out.”

“Got it,” Barnes said, following directions. A moment later he caught sight of Rogers and swore. Not slowing down in the slightest, Bucky parkoured down the side of the building, using his metal arm to make almost impossible turns and slow his momentum, finally landing in the alley with a heavy thud that would’ve wrecked Clint’s knees for weeks.

Rogers didn’t seem to notice the arrival, too busy sluggishly attacking an armacorn and bleeding to death, the idiot. Clint was at the wrong angle to make the shot without hitting Steve.

Pausing in her run, Black Widow lifted her gun, sighted, and fired. Times like these showed her lack of Sentinel eyesight, the only enhanced sense she was missing. Both Clint and Steve could’ve triangulated the shot at that distance while still running. Nevertheless, she hit what she aimed at. The armacorn staggered, slowed, and collapsed to the ground at Rogers’ feet.

Straightening from his crouch in the alley, Barnes peeked out at Rogers and swore again. “This is so undignified,” he muttered under his breath.

“What is?” Clint asked, shooting an armacorn sneaking up on Nat’s six. He kept a mental tally of how many bullets he had left.

Stark interrupted, “Does anyone have eyes on the murderbot and _mon capitan_? What’s going on? Also, this machine was obviously designed by a grade-schooler obsessed with Lisa Frank. I’m not sure it will work for anyone with a Y-chromosome and no V-card.”

Barnes didn’t bother answering either of them. Unsnapping his mask, he took off his goggles and slung back his gun, cracking his neck from side to side. Then he stalked out of the alley. Between one step and the next, his posture changed completely. Limping forward, he dropped his shoulders, hung his head, and went from looking like a heavy metal album cover to someone beat up by people listening to heavy metal.

“Stevie?” Barnes called weakly, producing a convincing sounding cough. “Stevie where are you? I need you.”

“Wow, A+ acting for the Winter Soldier,” Clint said admiringly, shifting to shoot another armacorn before turning back. “And Cap bought it, hook, line, and sinker. He’s rushing over. Well, as fast as a super soldier with his legs all messed up can rush.”

Reaching Barnes, Rogers stayed eerily silent as he tried to frantically pat Barnes down for injuries, but Barnes was having none of that. Shedding his weak facade, Barnes began a litany of insults as he forced Rogers to sit down and get treated. For a moment they grappled awkwardly, more embrace than fight as each tried to help the other. Rogers resisted, seemingly confused. Fed up, Barnes yanked Steve into a headlock and snapped his name sharply. Rogers abruptly went limp, all fight gone.

Barnes kept up a litany of complaints and insults, but his touch turned gentle. Rogers sat down and leaned into the Winter Soldier’s touch, seeming to enter a fugue state. He let himself be manhandled and bandaged until he resembled a mummy, but didn’t talk or move on his own.

With Rogers now in good hands, Black Widow switched priorities, racing past them to join forces with the Hulk in containing the remaining creatures and keeping them from the people who’d been trapped in the surrounding buildings. Clint took a running leap to a building with a better vantage point, doing his best to keep covering everyone from on high and calling out creature sightings. He had to make the last handful of bullets count.

Meanwhile, Bucky Barnes was worried and furious as he bandaged his best friend and the love of his life. “How dare you let yourself get this hurt! The serum isn’t carte blanche to paint the streets with your blood. That’s not the kind of art I want you taking up! You are such a _stupid_ little punk.”

“Winter Soldier, ten and four o’clock!” Hawkeye warned.

Head darting up, Bucky pulled out a gun. “Hold on a sec, lower your hearing, sweetheart.” He wrapped his arm around Steve’s head to cover her ears and pressed it to his chest. Lifting his weapon, he blasted the unicorn that had just appeared around the corner, twisted, and shot a pegasus from the sky. “There, all done.” He holstered his weapon and dropped his arm.

Dropping a hard kiss on Steve’s lips, he slung her arm over his shoulder, stood up, and started dragging her towards the nearest ambulance. It took him a few seconds to realize that he’d just kissed her as if it was something they did every day instead of only being their second kiss ever. It hadn’t felt weird, it had felt natural. He licked his lips and tried not to freak out about it or act on how much he wanted to do it again.

Dazed and lost, Stevie stared sightlessly, the corner of her mouth gaping open. One of her eyes was swollen shut. It was obvious she was having trouble with her Sentinel senses in addition to the injuries and whatever was going on in her head.

Blowing out a hard breath, Bucky forced himself to gentle his voice instead of letting loose another round of vicious swearing. Seeing her like this made his stomach hurt. He thinned his mental shields as he focused on her. “C’mon Stevie. Just focus your senses on the sound of my voice, on the smell of my skin, on the heat of my body. Taste me on your lips and see my face. Find your normal levels and come back to me, Doll. Take your time if you have to. I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.” He swallowed hard. “I’m here.”

Slowly turning her head so the eye not swollen shut faced him, Steve stared at him blankly. Over a minute later, she blinked. Her eye started to focus. Finally she rose out of her zoned out state. “Bu…cky?” she said haltingly, voice scratchy and weak. “You’re… here? You’re alive?”

“Yeah, it’s me, the metal arm version. I’m fine. You’re the one who’s messed up.” Steve had been so unresponsive that it had scared him. He’d been afraid that the Guide tricks he’d picked up over the last couple of months wouldn’t be enough to help or that she’d be stuck in the past and wouldn’t recognize him now.

Steve’s fingers fumbled weakly at the straps on his chest. It took Bucky a moment to understand what she wanted. Reaching up, he quickly undid the upper half of the buckles on his jacket. Immediately she slid inside, pressing her hand flat over his thin cotton shirt to feel the heat of his skin, the solid pumping of his heart and lungs, and the seam on his shoulder where metal met flesh. Stevie sighed and snuggled closer, soothed. Her fingertips softly petted his chest.

Her trust and need made something hot and tight rise behind Bucky’s eyes. He blinked hard.

Reaching the barricade, he put on his game face and barked for medical attention. A path to the nearest ambulance immediately opened up as people scurried out of the way. He carried Steve over and forced her to lie down on the stretcher inside for the attentions of the paramedics. It hurt to put her down, but she needed more help than he could give. The EMTs seemed scared, hesitating at the threshold, but hopped to it quickly enough when he sat down and began pointing out the extent of Steve’s injuries.

The female medic began to ask Bucky to exit the ambulance, but faltered under his icy stare. No one was prying him away from Stevie now. He knew enough to stay out of the way or pass the right thing over and they’d have to content themselves with that. The medic’s partner touched her arm and shook his head, thankfully telling her to let it go.

While Bucky was trying to keep a gimlet eye on the work of the paramedics and check everything before allowing anyone to drug Steve, Iron Man’s voice came annoyingly over the com. “Bad news, folks. The crazy doctor built in a worm that started eating the code when she died. It would take me hours we don't have to recreate it. It also opened all of the remaining trailers holding those creatures. The army’s almost here, but until then, we’re going to have to take out the rest of them the hard way. Sorry, guys.”

“You should go,” Steve said weakly, eavesdropping on his com since she’d lost hers. The stubborn and noble expression on her face was the Captain America mask. She used it to hide what she was really thinking.

“I’m not leaving you like this, not when you can barely stand and there’re still killer unicorns and irritating FBI agents out there. You look like you got beat up by all seven of the Jamison boys in a back alley,” Bucky protested, calling on newly restored childhood memories to distract Steve from digging in her heels.

Licking her lips, Steve tried to smile, reopening a split lip and sending a fresh trickle of blood down her chin in a way he felt like he must’ve seen a dozen times growing up. After his mind healing, he could almost remember all of them. Not disappointing him, Steve boasted in a rusty-sounding voice, “I had ‘em on the ropes, Buck. I didn’t need you to come and save me.”

“Sure you didn’t,” Bucky said condescendingly as the EMT started Steve on an IV Bucky had pre-approved and then scurried out of the ambulance, leaving them alone. At least the emergency treatment seemed to be helping. That and the break from fighting, which allowed Steve’s healing factor to kick into high gear. The swelling in her eye was already going down and her gouges were scabbing over and even turning into angry red lines on her skin.

Reaching up with fingers stained with blood, gunpowder, and dirt, Steve grabbed the collar of Bucky’s jacket and pulled him down close to her face. Her stare pierced him. “I’m out of this fight for now, but the Avengers could use the help of a good soldier like you,” she said earnestly, voice weak. The warmth of her breath moved across his cheeks like a caress.

“Stevie,” he protested weakly, staring into her blue eyes from inches away. Nothing else on Earth matched that particular shade of blue. He’d looked. The blood and bruises were mere set pieces, framing her beauty and highlighting the bonfire blazing inside her soul. Her pupils dilated.

Nostrils flaring, Steve veiled her eyes, turned her face into his jaw, and took a slow, deep breath, ending on a sigh that slid warmly across his skin like the echo of a kiss. The press of their warm skin felt like bliss. He didn’t care if it made him emotional or needy. Bucky didn’t want to ever move.

Then she spoke and ruined it, just like always. “Back to the front, Sergeant,” she ordered, dropping her fingers from his collar, leaning back, and opening her eyes to meet his.

Practical always trumped sentimental when it came to Steve.

Just once he’d like it to be the other way.

Frowning grumpily, Bucky reluctantly straightened and began strapping up his jacket. “You’re the only person I’ll take orders from nowadays, so I’ll go, but the next time we talk, I better be speaking to Stevie and not Captain America.”

He took a step back, their eyes still locked. “You hear me? I said _Stevie_ , not Steve.” His Brooklyn accent thickened, lending the words an even heavier weight.

“You’re the only person who even knows there’s a difference, much less cares.” She gave him a tremulous smile.

Pointing a metal finger, he took another step back. “That’s your problem right there. You’re making yourself miserable for no reason, you dumb punk. Your team would care if you let them actually get to know the real you. All this secrecy isn’t necessary.” Steve grimaced and then winced and froze as the action pulled at her scalp wounds.

Bucky snorted. “But we’ll talk about your masochistic streak later. I’m gonna go kill things and keep your team safe for you. You go get patched up at the hospital and try to relax. See if one of their isolation rooms or S&G counselors can help with your headache.”

“Thanks, Buck.” Steve was not masochistic, no matter what Bucky said. She also had no idea what good an isolation room or S&G counselor would do for her—fake Sentinel here—or how he’d even known about her killer headache, not that everything on her body didn’t hurt right now.

Bucky nodded, but still hesitated to go. “You sure you’re gonna be okay without me?”

Steve looked away, the heroic mask of Captain America turning to sand in her fingers as she let herself be honest for once. “I’m never okay without you, but you’ve gotta go. They need you. My team and the people trapped by those creatures need you. You have to go.”

Sucking in a deep breath, Bucky pulled his goggles back on and snapped his mask closed. The plates on his arm recalibrated with a metallic growl. “Right.” If he didn’t leave now, he wasn’t going to be able to leave at all. He could feel the warring emotions of need and duty swirling in Stevie’s heart.

“Hey,” Steve waited until he looked over, “don’t let them destroy the Rocky statue. I’m with the Hulk. It’s a good boxing movie.” She forced a half-smile onto her face, trying to reassure Bucky that she’d be fine after all. He didn’t need to be distracted worrying about her.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Bucky said sarcastically. However, he fell into parade rest and gave a picture perfect salute, without a hint of mockery. Gravely she saluted him back from her bed.

Pivoting on his heel, the Winter Solider hopped out of the ambulance and ran back into the fight, not letting himself turn for a final look at Stevie.

As soon as the sight of Bucky disappeared around the corner, Steve moved to sound and scent to follow his progress. But it wasn’t more than a minute or two before even that became too faint and she could no longer sense him. Even a Sentinel could only do so much, especially a fake one.

Bucky was gone.

The thin cord holding her rationality together snapped. Steve panicked. Her vitals crashed.

The EMTs jumped into the back of the ambulance and slammed the doors. They frantically worked to stabilize her. Steve couldn’t calm down or tell them the problem. All she could do was repeat over and over that Bucky was still alive. Bucky was still alive.

Bucky was still alive. She had been the one to send him away, but he’d be back. Bucky was still alive and Steve just needed to hold on and keep breathing.

If only she could remember how.

They raced away to the hospital, machines hissing and sirens blaring. Steve was only vaguely aware of what was going on around her as she focused on her mantra. Someone injected something into her arm.

“What was the patient’s name again?” the man holding the oxygen mask over her face asked.

“I don’t know,” a female voice said as unconsciousness sucked Stevie down into the dark. “I was too scared of the big guy with the metal arm to ask. Hopefully he’ll recover enough to tell us himself.”


	12. Chapter 12

 

Steve jerked awake, but when she opened her eyes, she couldn’t see anything.

For a moment, terror gripped her. Was it truly that dark... or had the super soldier serum finally failed? Was she blind?

No. Wait, the dials on her vision were only set too low. If she found her normal vision levels, she’d be able to see again. 

Too bad normal was so hard to find.

Switching focus, she used her other senses. Based on the echoes, she was inside a small room. Voices full of stress and pain cried out nearby. The heavy scent of industrial strength, sentinel-friendly antiseptic overpowered everything else except for the scent of blood and death she carried with her.

A man walked into the room, opening and closing the door. He wore  _ Old Spice _ brand deodorant. She knew because…? Because Sam had once given her some as a joke. Steve heard the clacking sounds of a closing shower curtain and then the man moved up to the bed where she lay. Closing her useless eyes, she made sure to keep faking sleep.

Suddenly the man grabbed her arm. He slid a cold metal rod beneath the edge of her uniform, but it wasn’t a rod, it was scissors. The sound of the metal shears snipping closed felt like an air raid siren as he began cutting off her clothing in preparation for who knows what. 

One of Steve’s recurring nightmares involved being vivisected for the secrets of the super soldier serum.

But they’d forgotten to tie her down. Exploding into action, she snatched away the scissors and rolled off the opposite side of the bed. An IV ripped out of her arm with a sharp tug of pain and wet splatter. The man shouted in surprise. 

Steve wanted to fight, but her legs refused to support her weight, sending her crashing to the floor. Scrambling, she heaved her body over until her back faced the wall, shifted the scissors in her hand so the blades faced out, and desperately struggled with her vision, finally getting the room to swing into focus. 

A man with sandy blond hair, dark shadows under his eyes, and green scrubs stood on the other side of a hospital bed with his hands raised. He wore a badge that said  _ Nurse Pike _ . “Calm down, Sir. You’re safe. This is the hospital. I’m a nurse. I was just trying to get rid of your dirty clothes so I could treat your wounds. You were hurt in that crazy unicorn attack downtown and they brought you here, don’t you remember? Sir?” 

Steve nodded slowly and tried to let go of the adrenalin. To be honest, most of the battle was foggy after she’d reached the school bus, but there was an ambulance and Bucky in there somewhere. A hospital made sense. 

What else had happened? 

At the bus, a young man had been hurt, the enemy attacked in overwhelming numbers, and something in Steve’s mind had taken over, shutting down everything but that need to protect her charges and revenge her mate—or rather, the injured boy who’d looked like Bucky. 

Through the haze of blood and battle, she distantly remembered Clint saying something important, impossible, and true, but what had it been? Then the beta Sentinel—no, Natasha—Natasha had come and taken the children to safety. Unable to stand down with so many left to protect and so many foes still threatening, Steve had returned to the battle. 

Then Bucky had come and made everything better... before leaving again. Bucky always left. There was something fundamentally wrong about Bucky always leaving… but hadn’t Steve been the one ordering him to go? 

Maybe there was actually something fundamentally wrong with Steve. Why did she do this to herself? Did it have to be this way?

“Sir? You need to get clean before we can treat your wounds. Can you tell me your name?” 

When Steve just stared at the nurse mutely, feeling exhausted and sad, the nurse moved on, “Okay, well, you’ll need stitches after we disinfect all those wounds, but the good news is that the triage doctor took a quick look and doesn’t think you’ll need surgery. You’re very lucky. The EMTs who dropped you off made you sound much worse off. Do you have any sharp pains or empathic or sensory issues we should be aware of? Things are a little crazy right now with all of the patients, so if we missed something, you need to let us know right away so we can help you.” 

The man’s breath smelled like salt & vinegar potato chips overlaid with peppermint candy. Combined with the scent of his  _ Old Spice _ deodorant, it made Steve feel nauseous.

Shaking her head, Steve forced herself up off the floor. She wanted to stand, but didn’t have the strength. She didn’t trust the nurse enough just yet to make herself vulnerable by laying down in the bed again. Instead, she carefully lowered herself into a nearby chair. Her senses were oscillating up and down, but she was doing her best not to let on. “I’m fine.”

Nurse Pike gave Steve an unimpressed look and stepped forward. At least he didn’t move like a man with combat training. Even injured, Steve could probably overpower the man if necessary. “That’s what I’m here to make sure of, Sir. Now that you’re awake, I’m going to help you into the shower chair in the bathroom and we’ll soap you off and get you into a clean gown. Can I have my scissors back?” He held out his hand commandingly. 

After a moment of hesitation, Steve passed them over. Seconds later her sense of hearing slid off kilter. The sound of the nurse’s heartbeat and rhythmically clenching intestines burst into her ears like a brass band. She wanted to curl up with her hands clenched over her ears. Instead, she focused on breathing evenly and waited for it to pass. 

“We have a lot of patients left to treat today, so let’s get you cleaned up in the shower. Then the next free doctor can have a look at you, make sure we didn’t miss anything internal, and get to those stitches.” Nurse Pike had big hands covered in hair and calluses. Steve didn’t want those hands anywhere near her, especially not her naked and vulnerable body, nurse with no combat training or not.

Steve’s hearing returned to normal, but now her taste vacillated between overwhelmingly fruity ketosis to the blank fuzz of burned off taste buds. Her senses may be all over the place, but the pain radiating throughout her body and mind was a constant. Everything felt strained and overtired. Steve unexpectedly ached for her long-lost mother’s gentle, soothing touch. 

She didn’t have it in her to compromise right now. “No,” Steve said stubbornly, scraping up the energy to add a polite, “Thank you.”

Mouth going tight, the nurse crossed his arms and took a deep breath. “Sir, you have to get cleaned off, the sooner the better. You have a multitude of cuts and bite wounds hiding under those field bandages. Who knows what diseases were growing in the mouths of those unicorn creatures? Even a normal animal bite is filthy and can cause tetanus and severe infections if left untreated. Step one is soaping the wounds thoroughly.”

Setting her chin, Steve said, “I can clean off on my own.”

“Hospital policy won’t allow me to leave you alone in your unsteady state. You could fall and injure yourself worse,” he said impatiently, the lines on his brow deepening.

“Then I’ll wait for a female nurse.” Steve primly crossed her arms and sat back into the chair like an immovable rock.

Nostrils flaring, Nurse Pike’s ears went red with temper. “I’m completely capable of helping you in a professional manner, Sir. It could take some time for a female nurse to become available since we’re operating over patient capacity with the emergency.”

“Nevertheless, I’ll wait.” Steve stared him down. “It would make me more comfortable.”

Over the hospital PA, they called out a spate of emergency codes and the arrival of a new flock of patients. Steve sympathized with the overworked nurse, but she would not be swayed. She didn’t want him touching her. 

Rubbing a hand over his head, Nurse Pike grimaced and sighed in defeat. “Fine, you seem stable enough for now. At least move to the bed while you wait. Let me tape some gauze over where the IV came out and put on a heart monitor on case you crash and can’t call for help. If you do need emergency help, press the red button on the bed. One of our staff will come as quickly as possible.” Putting words to action, Pike worked efficiently and then left without a backward glance.

Settling in, Steve did her best to blank her mind, ignore the pain, and not obsess over how her team was doing fighting without her. She dozed fitfully.

Some time later, a female nurse finally knocked on the door and came into the room. “Hello, Sir, I’m Nurse Hawkins.” She had strawberry blond hair pulled back into a bun and blue scrubs under a white lab coat. Her kind eyes instantly put Steve at ease. “I heard you needed some help cleaning off.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve nodded, getting unsteadily to her feet. 

The nurse looked up at Steve and frowned, stepping forward to brace Steve’s arm. She was short but sturdy. “It looks from your clothes like you’ve lost a lot of blood. If you’re feeling lightheaded, please don’t push yourself.” Steve didn’t bother answering. Pursing her lips at Steve’s expression, the nurse nodded. “One of those, I see. Well, can I have a name to call you?” 

“I’m nobody special,” Steve demurred, not interested in getting special treatment for being Captain America. She also didn’t want her true sex to leak out to the media before she was ready for it, and right after a battle with unicorns seemed possibly like the worst time ever, especially since her team still didn’t know. To be honest, she still didn’t want her team to know. The thought of their negative reactions was too much to deal with right now.

“Very well,” Nurse Hawkins sighed. “Is there anyone we should call for you?”

Steve shook her head. “They’re all busy right now.”

Nodding skeptically, the nurse walked them into the small room housing a toilet, shower cubicle, and shower chair. With the way Steve’s sense of balance was off, she needed the help. “I don’t think we’ll be able to salvage any of your clothing, but if you want to try, I can put them in a bag for you,” the nurse offered. 

“No, just toss them,” Steve said, knowing her uniform was too damaged. Luckily Tony had made her extras. “I’ll keep the boots, but that’s it.” Steve hated wearing in new boots, as the itch of constantly healing blisters made her want to scratch and scratch. After sitting Steve down in the chair, the Nurse helped remove Steve’s boots and put them in a large plastic bag labelled with the same patient number as her hospital wristband. 

“I’m going to turn on the shower to start loosening the crust on some of those bandages,” Nurse Hawkins said. “Just sit there and try to relax. Please let me know if you start feeling faint, Sir.” 

Fetching scissors and a large trash bag, Nurse Hawkins started cutting off Steve’s trashed clothing and the bandages. Bucky had used so many rolls of gauze, Steve looked like an Egyptian mummy. Where they hadn’t glued themselves to bloody scabs, they’d stuck to the armacorn viscera splattered all over Steve’s body. The warm water helped loosen some of it, but it still hurt to pull them off partially healed bites and horn punctures. Steve undid what zippers and buckles she could, but mostly just sat there in silence as the nurse worked. 

Exhaustion ate at the edges of her mind.

A little more than halfway through the process, Nurse Hawkins fingers paused for several long seconds before resuming their cutting as if nothing had happened. “Luckily most of this blood doesn’t seem to be yours,” she said. Pink and brown water swirled down the drain, but at least it wasn’t black and red like at the start. Peeling off the last of Steve’s pants, Nurse Hawkins tossed them in the trash. “What is your preferred mode of address?” she asked calmly.

“What?” Steve asked thickly, rousing herself from her stupor. She’d been on the verge of zoning on the water swirling down the drain. Clearing her throat, she made herself focus on the nurse.

“Would you prefer Sir or Ma’am? Or something else as an address?” Nurse Hawkins sprayed Steve down one more time and then soaped up a washcloth. “People prefer different pronouns sometimes that don’t always match their outward appearance. What would make you feel most comfortable?” 

“I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that,” Steve said slowly. “It isn’t safe to have preferences.”

Carefully scrubbing the wounds on Steve’s legs with the soapy washcloth, Nurse Hawkins looked up and met Steve’s eyes. “It’s just me and you in here. This is a safe space.”

Tears pricked Steve’s eyes and she had to look away. Voice hushed beneath the sound of falling water, Steve confessed, “I… I think I might prefer Ma’am sometimes, but... to do my job it has to be Sir.” 

“Are you sure it still has to be that way? The world is changing every day,” Nurse Hawkins said compassionately. The water going down the drain finally looked clear.

Shrugging, Steve scraped away a scab on her thigh, the skin underneath already mostly healed. “Sometimes I like being a Sir. It’s not too bad.”

“I’m may just be a nurse, but I think you deserve to work in a place where you’re respected for whoever you want to be. There are a lot of places nowadays that value strong women and nonbinary people. Now, close your eyes for me.” After soaping Steve’s head wound and hair, the nurse did a last rinse and then turned off the water, fetching several warm, white towels to dry them both off. She discarded her soaked lab coat into a bin.

Getting Steve into a backless white hospital gown, Nurse Hawkins helped Steve settle into the bed. Just sitting in a chair showering had left Steve on the verge of passing out. It was ridiculous and slightly alarming, if she had the energy to be alarmed. Most of her body was focused on healing and recovering from the battle and that strange mental episode.

After bandaging her wounds, the nurse pulled the blanket over Steve and pressed the call button to talk to the nurse’s desk. A harried doctor poked her head in for less than two minutes, made sure Steve wasn’t on the verge of death, decided Steve didn’t need any stitches after all, and ran out again. 

Going to insert an IV for the things the doctor had ordered, Nurse Hawkins said, “I know it’s none of my business, but if you can’t or don’t want to leave your job, there are safe spaces both in the city and online to go and be yourself for a time, places you can talk to other people with similar issues. As a jumping off point, you could try googling Transgender or LGBTQ websites. They often have forums, meetings, and helpline phone numbers. You shouldn’t have to struggle with this alone.”

Uncomfortable, Steve lifted one shoulder and looked away. “I’m used to being alone. I’ll be alright, but thank you. Can I leave now?”

“Hah, not even close.” Picking up Steve’s chart, Nurse Hawkins began writing. “You got really lucky out there today, so don’t push it and make yourself worse. You have a lot of wounds, but somehow they don’t actually look that bad considering all of the blood on those bandages we cut off. If you’re careful, you’ll heal well. We’re downgrade your urgency level and having you moved to another room on the normal floors. You probably won’t see another doctor for several more hours, but the nurses will be around if anything happens.”

“That’s fine. I’m sure there are people who need a doctor’s attention more than me,” Steve said. She’d never much liked doctors or hospitals, past or present. As the nurse kept scribbling on the chart, Steve asked, “Could you possibly...  _ not _ write female down on my paperwork?”

Giving her a sympathetic look, the nurse shook her head. “For the doctors to treat you effectively, we can’t lie. We can use a fake name if you’re worried about your work finding out, but it will make it harder for any concerned friends or family to find you.”

Steve had been trying to keep the Avengers from finding out her gender, but the even worse thought of men like General Ross, who’d have no compunction about starting up a new breeding program, or organizations like Hydra and AIM getting ahold of her in her weakened state and experimenting on her made Steve’s stomach turn over queasily. “I’d prefer a fake name. Maybe Peggy?—no, how about just Jane Smith, that’s simple enough.”

“Yes, Ma’am, Jane Smith it is,” Nurse Hawkins said smartly, writing it down. “Good luck with everything. I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to see you again, but I have a feeling you’re going to be alright.” Giving Steve a nod and farewell smile, she turned and left.

Several minutes later, an orderly came in and transferred “Jane Smith” down crowded halls to a new room the size of a cereal box. Two other patient beds had already been crammed inside when they slotted Steve against the wall like fitting one last cigarette into the box. A second orderly followed, dropping off food trays to each bed table before leaving.

The young polynesian-looking woman on the far end of the row of beds tugged up her blanket higher and shivered, ignoring the food. On the bed in the middle, a skinny black woman grabbed the saltine crackers and shoved the rest of the tray over onto Steve’s table. “I’m Kara and on a diet and refuse to be tempted by sugar and fat, injured or not. Besides, you look like a bodybuilder or something. You probably need the food more than I do.”

“Thanks.” Steve suddenly felt ravenous. All that healing took a lot of calories. “I’m St— _ Jane _ . I’m Jane.”

“No problem, Jane,” Kara said. Biting her lip, she snatched back the red jello cup off the tray she’d given Steve and then turned resolutely away from the food to face the TV where the news was playing. “Eat the rest of that before I take more,” she ordered, shoving a spoonful of gelatin into her mouth and humming quietly in pleasure. 

Reporters filled a small box in the corner of the screen while the rest of the screen was taken up by slightly grainy video of the Avengers in downtown Philadelphia. On screen, Iron Man swooshed by, a civilian under each arm as he flew towards safety. The camera shifted down to focus on Hawkeye. He looked exasperated to be fighting hand-to-hand as he jumped over a charging armacorn’s head and landed on its back, shoving a large knife into its spinal column before leaping away again with a circus-trained flourish. Hawkeye must be out of both arrows and bullets, if he’d turned to knives. 

Before Steve could get too concerned, Widow came skidding around the corner and tossed Hawkeye a pair of guns, drawing two more from holsters on her thighs. A menacing-looking Pegasus appeared over their heads, but jerked a second later and dropped dead to the ground. The camera shifted to the Winter Soldier on the roof of a car nearby, rifle raised. 

Steve’s heart jerked. It felt like she was bleeding out again, she missed Bucky so badly. Seeing him on TV wasn’t enough. She needed to smell him, touch him, hear his voice, and taste his skin. She needed to be with Bucky. All her senses suddenly felt shaky. The once-soft sheets rasped her skin like sandpaper and the sweetness of the jello turned cloying.

On the TV, the Winter Soldier hopped off the car and joined Hawkeye and Black Widow. The three turned as one and trotted off after the green form of the Hulk in the distance. Iron Man zoomed back into frame to cover them from the sky. Steve felt a strange jealousy. Maybe the team didn’t need Captain America after all. 

The image shifted to show trucks full of national guardsmen disgorging at police barricades to help the Avengers mop up the situation.

Losing interest, Steve suddenly remembered what Hawkeye had said during the her strange episode. The voice sounded in her memory as if heard from underwater, but she could just make out the words, “Steve’s gone Feral.”

_ Feral _ .

Steve didn’t want to believe it, but could there really be any other explanation for what had happened? She had gone  _ Feral  _ and lost control. If Natasha hadn’t come, that boy could have bled to death without medical attention. Not only that, but she’d attacked Tony and almost attacked Natasha. Deep down, the truth resonated in her soul.

It felt like the end of the world. No one was going to trust Steve in a fight ever again. She was off the Avengers. Her life was effectively over. 

What was she going to do now?

Whimpering cut through Steve’s dark spiral of misery and self-loathing. The polynesian girl in the corner began sobbing, knocking over her tray as she curled up in a ball. Concerned, Steve felt a mental tug and realized that the girl must be a Guide in distress. The girl’s breathing turned harsh and labored. Steve had to help her. Nothing else was more important, especially not Steve’s drama. She put it away in a box and closed the lid to focus on the girl in need.

Mind forming a strategy, Steve threw her blankets off and crawled over Kara’s skinny legs to the Guide’s bed. Bracing herself on all fours around the woman’s tightly curled body, Steve put her forearms on either side of the Guide’s head and imagined herself as a shield, trying to physically block out the unwanted emotions bombarding the girl’s mind. “I’m sorry. Hold on and try to push the emotions away.”

“It hurts,” the girl breathed. “Please... help me, Sentinel.” Tears streamed from her clenched eyes. A Guide without shields could go catatonic. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t know how,” Steve said helplessly. 

The Guide twisted. Her forehead landed against Steve’s bare arm. At the touch, the girl hiccuped and pressed her face closer, reaching up to tightly wind her fingers around Steve’s wrists. 

Gulping in a breath, Steve put on a face almost never used, that of Stevie-the-Sentinel. “I’ve got you,” Steve promised, picturing a mental shield around the girl’s head to block out unwanted emotions. “I’m here.” The girl’s breathing gradually slowed.

The dinging of the call button from the middle bed finally stopped as someone answered at the nurses station. “We have an emergency in here!” Kara snapped. “There’s a Guide in distress. Get one of the Gifted in here ASAP!”

“Seriously?” the overworked nurse exclaimed before sucking in a quick breath. “No, sorry, I’ll find someone somewhere in this madhouse and send them right over. Just try to keep the Guide calm.” The line clicked off.

Kara scoffed, her cloud of dark brown curls bouncing at the irate toss of her head. “Keep her calm, what excellent advice. I’m sure we never would’ve thought of that one on our own.” Glancing at Steve, her full lips pursed, “Though you seem to be managing it okay.” 

The girl reached up and gripped the collar of Steve’s hospital gown, keeping her eyes clenched as she whispered, “My shields… are… gone. Hurts.”

“We know, help’s coming. Just hang on, girl,” Kara ordered. Steve shifted to try and loosen the strangling pressure of her hospital gown around her neck. Kara shook her head and sighed. 

Levering herself out of bed with a wince, Kara limped over to a huge purse leaning against the wall and pulled out a red cascade of fabric that proved to be a wraparound dress. Slowly she limped back to the bed and sat down with a relieved grimace. “Here, put this on,  _ St—Jane _ , calmer of Guides,” she said with pointed emphasis. “Your pale naked butt is hanging out of that stupid hospital gown and pointing straight at the door. No woman should have to make a first impression like that. It’s undignified, no matter how muscular and round that behind may be.”

Steve felt her face go bright red with mortification. She tried tugging the hospital gown back up and over her rear, but the it was trapped under the Guide’s body and wouldn’t come loose easily. “I don’t think your clothing will fit me,” Steve mumbled. 

“That’s why you’re lucky this dress belongs to my sister, an amazon of a woman who never diets. It should cover the important bits,” Kara said, tossing the open dress over Steve’s back so it billowed down around her sides. “This red isn’t her color, but it flatters your pasty white hospital skintone surprisingly well. You can keep it if you want.”

“Thanks,” Steve said dryly, shrugging on the dress one arm at a time so she didn’t lose contact with the distressed Guide on the bed. 

Steve had covered up just in time, as a brisk knock sounded on the door and two men rushed inside. The nurse wore scrubs, but all Steve could see was the other man. He had a sticker on his chest with  _ Visitor - Guide Robert Mitchum.  _ Guide Mitchum thinned his shields and released a soothing cloud of power, barely sparing Kara a glance as he rushed forward to help Steve and the young Guide.

As a Sentinel, Steve felt the sweet rush of the Guide’s power bring her headache down several notches. She wanted to blame the rush of attraction on that, but Guide Mitchum was also drop-dead gorgeous, with a dimple in his chin that rivalled Bucky’s. Steve had a weakness for dimpled chins. Instinctively, she could feel that he was unbonded. Guide Mitchum felt solid and trustworthy, with lines on his face that hinted at laughter. Steve was desperately grateful that Kara had covered up Steve’s behind before he’d entered. 

“Which of you is the one in distress?” Guide Mitchum asked, focusing his piercing gaze on Steve crouched on the bed. “I thought it was a Guide and not a Sentinel?” He sounded both concerned and intrigued. 

Shifting back to reveal the girl she’d been sheltering, Steve shook off her attraction and recalled herself to duty. “It is a Guide. She’s the one in trouble.” 

As Guide Mitchum moved forward, Steve slid back out of reach, climbing over Kara to reach her own bed. Guide Mitchum looked torn, as if he wanted to reach out after Steve, but then the girl whimpered in distress. Instantly Guide Mitchum focused on soothing the young Guide and bolstering her shields. “I’m Guide Mitchum. I’m here to help you,” he said. Cradling the girl’s face in his fingers, he began murmuring softly, coaxing her to calm down and start rebuilding her mental shields.

The male nurse cleared his throat, drawing Steve and Kara’s attention. “We’re going to move you ladies out to give the Guide mental space to recover. We might have to put you in the hall temporarily, but we’ll find you new rooms as soon as possible.” Placing Steve’s boots and Kara’s purse on the ends of their beds, he unlocked Kara’s bed first and wheeled her out.

“Good luck, Kara, and thanks!” Steve called after her. Kara gave him a thumbs up before rolling out of sight.

On the TV, the Winter Soldier appeared in a closeup. The reporters speculated on the mysterious new Avenger. Steve felt a surge of longing. Her equilibrium wobbled like the jello she’d just consumed. The Guide energy lapping against her mind made her feel restless and hollow. Steve needed to get out of here and find Bucky. 

Steve wanted Bucky.

“Alright, Ma’am. Here we go,” a young orderly said as he burst into the room, not even looking at Steve’s face as he unlocked the wheels on her bed, grabbed her IV pole, and pushed her out into the crowded hallway. Kara and the other nurse were nowhere in sight. “Sorry, I’m going to have to park your bed over in a relatively quiet corner. They’re starting to ship people to other hospitals with more open beds, so you shouldn’t be stuck out here for too long. Try to sleep if you can.” With that, the orderly parked Steve’s bed, locked the wheels, and hurried away.

Steve knuckled her eyes, feeling swamped once more with heartache. The artificial lights overhead stabbed into her eyes and the electrical buzzing stung her ears like swarms of bees. She didn’t want to be abandoned here, unwanted and alone. Everything about this place made it hard to breath, as if she was a child with pneumonia all over again. Steve hated hospitals. It wasn’t like they could really help her get better. She had the serum for that.

In fact, there was no reason for her to stay here at all.

Sitting up, she dropped her legs over the side of the bed and looked around. Her corner of the hallway was relatively quiet, the staff busy in rooms and the other patients sleeping or distracted by their own misery. No one was paying her any attention.

The IV bag looked deflated, so Steve turned off the power on the IV box so it wouldn’t beep and removed the needle from her vein, pressing a fold of her blanket against her arm until the bleeding stopped and the serum closed the hole. Next she ripped off the ID bracelet around her wrist. Tugging her chart free of the clipboard on the bed, Steve folded it in half and tossed it the nearest garbage can along with her ID bracelet. There was no need for the hospital to keep them if she was leaving. 

Steve’s combat boots were still filthy, but at least she knew she could run in them if necessary. Tugging them on over the hospital socks, she laced them up with shaking fingers. She had to get out of here. Find Bucky if she could, and if she couldn’t, lay low for a while and just focus on figuring herself out. 

Standing up, Steve tied the red dress closed over her white hospital gown. It didn’t actually look that bad. Considering Steve hadn’t worn a dress since she’d hit puberty, she expected it to feel stranger than it did. Or perhaps everything just felt so strange that the dress was a blip on top of the collapse of her identity. 

For a full minute, she stood staring at herself in the reflection of a window, a tall blonde woman in a red dress and combat boots. Exhaustion crashed down on her and the world wavered. Without a Guide to protect, without a focus, Steve’s thoughts turned fuzzy.

_ Get out, find Bucky _ , she reminded herself, chanting it over and over even as all other thoughts fell over the edge of a waterfall into oblivion.

Turning, she walked slowly but steadily out of the hospital. In the chaos of all the injured people and frantic visitors coming and going, and the rows of ambulances coming to drop off and take away patients to other hospitals, no one tried to stop her. She walked for a very long time.

Injured, disoriented, hungry, and tired, the Sentinel couldn’t find her Guide’s scent anywhere.  She couldn’t protect anyone, much less herself like this. The edges of her vision went foggy and her mind to syrup. She needed to stop. 

Down the street, a dirty man took a half-eaten sandwich from a trash can, unwrapped it, and scarfed it down in three bites. The Sentinel watched hungrily. Tilting her head to the side, she narrowed her eyes and flared her nostrils. She could smell food in another trashcan across the street. 

Crossing over, she found a partially eaten muffin in a paper bag and an empty styrofoam cup with a single sip of juice left. Stuffing the muffin in her mouth before someone could take it, she carried the cup for two more blocks, but couldn’t find any clean water to drink, only water with too many chemicals that would make her sick. 

Unable to go farther, she stumbled down onto a flattened piece of cardboard in the shade of a building. Dropping her cup, she curled up with her head buried in her arms to block out as much as the sensory noise as possible. Between one breath and the next, she was swept away over the waterfall into the oblivion of sleep.  


	13. Chapter 13

**** At long last, the situation in downtown Philadelphia had been contained and the army had taken over. Disgustingly dirty, exhausted, and starving, the Avengers dragged themselves to the quinjet. Tony shucked his Iron Man suit with a relieved sigh. “Someone remind me, if I ever turn into a mad scientist, to not use mythical beasts for my minions.”

“Is that an actual concern?” Clint asked, racking his bow in his weapons locker. “Because if so, I would be very disappointed in you.”

“That I’d go mad?” Tony grabbed one of his green smoothies from the fridge and gulped it down.

“Oh, no, you going mad wouldn’t surprise anyone who’s met you,” Clint said, removing his tac vest and shirt with a sigh and rubbing down his chest, arms, and pits with a wet wipe.

“Ha double ha,” Tony answered flatly, grabbing a wet wipe from the box to scrub his face and the back of his neck.

Clint moved to the side to make room. “No, it’s you being so crass as to copy a mad scientist who’s already failed. Also you making unicorns, because considering your sordid past, that’s something doomed to failure.” Nat snorted in agreement, doing her own cleanup on the side. Bruce lay reclining in a chair in the back of the jet with an arm over his face.

“I promise, Barton, if I do go mad, I will give you something big and flashy and exciting. Something to impress even someone who grew up in the circus.” Tony bowed from the waist with a flourish.

“Does anyone have an update on Steve?” Barnes interrupted, standing alone to one side with his arms folded.

“Jarvis,” Tony called, “update on Rogers?”

“Yes, Sir, searching for Captain Rogers now. I’ve found records for two Steve Rogers in the local hospital system. One is for a five year old with a lego up his nose, so we’ll assume that isn’t relevant. The other is for a Steve Rogers admitted with wounds from the battle downtown. Notes are messy and from a scanned-in, handwritten file, but it looks like Captain Rogers was treated and is now resting. A full recovery is expected.”

“Does he need me to fly in any extra doctors?” Tony asked with concern. “And put his bill on my card. See if they’ll upgrade him to a better room.”

Jarvis paused for a moment before answering. “The hospital is at capacity for the moment, Sir, and unable to meet your request. However, there are several hospitals within thirty minutes of travel that would suit your needs.”

“Or,” Natasha said pointedly, “you can let Steve sleep for a couple of hours and then just fly him home with us to New York. He can stay in Avengers Tower to recover with Barnes as his personal nurse. Doctors can visit him there.”

Tony frowed and began typing something on his phone. “Good idea. If we leave him here so close to DC, Sam might renew his campaign to get Steve to move back closer to his bro.”

“I’ll go wait with Steve at the hospital,” Barnes said, straightening up from the wall. “Which one is it?”

“You might want to clean up first and get something to eat so you don’t scare the staff to death or bite someone’s head off,” Clint suggested fearlessly.

“Is that a thing you can do?” Tony asked, not looking up from his typing. “Literally bite someone’s head off?”

Unbuckling his tac vest with barely leashed frustration, Barnes lifted his metal arm and wiggled the fingers with a menacing growl of servos. “Not with my teeth, but I can twist your head off like a bottle cap.”

Feeling ghoulishly curious, Clint leaned forward. “Is that something you’ve actually done, or are you just teasing?”

“No! I don’t want to know any grisly details!” Bruce barked, sitting up from the back. “I just want to get clean and have a nice big meal before we go and get Steve.”

Finally looking up, Tony announced, “Alright, folks. I booked us connecting suites at Philly’s premier hotel for the next few hours and ordered three of everything on their room service menu. I had them put extra supplies in all our bathrooms to scrub off the spatters of Lisa Frank. We have permission to park the quinjet on the roof, so if Barton wants to hop to it, Jarvis already entered the address into the nav system.”

Pulling on a fresh t-shirt, Clint moved to the cockpit and started up the engine. Steve’s absence felt strange. As the quinjet lifted off, Clint couldn’t help but voice the question bouncing around in his mind. “Should we talk about what happened with Steve?”

All conversation died.

“You said Steve went Feral,” Tony finally said, unhappily. “He attacked me when I tried to help with those kids, didn’t even seem to recognize me, like we were strangers.”

“What?” Bruce asked in shock. He didn’t always remember his time as the Hulk and he’d been distracted during Steve’s drama.

“Steve’s a Sentinel,” Barnes shrugged, movement casual but eyes cold and watchful, no longer looking at the team with the camaraderie of before. 

Tony swung back and forth in his chair. “But I thought his enhancements came from the super soldier serum changing his body. Going Feral is, like, tapping into the astral plane and merging with a primal animal spirit or something, right?” He looked around for confirmation. 

Natasha had that look on her face that said she was tossing around a crazy idea but not ready to share just yet. “Steve once told me that the serum takes everything latent and amplifies it, so that good becomes great and bad becomes worse.”

“If there’s no spiritual woowoo with the serum, why would Rogers attack me... and could he do it again?” Tony grimaced.

“C’mon Stark. You didn’t even get hurt.” Muscles tensing, the plates on Barnes’s metal arm shifted into a new configuration with a menacing growl. Clint was starting to suspect that he made those sounds on purpose. When he wanted to, the Winter Soldier could move in perfect silence. 

“Not this time,” Tony said challengingly.

“Admittedly,” Clint chimed in, trying to dial back the tension before someone set off Bruce again, “I’ve also attacked Tony when he startles me first thing in the morning. Personally, I think it’s been good training at dodging projectiles.”

“I’ve accidentally attacked most of you too, though usually while green,” Bruce added. 

Voice going silky, Barnes shed his aggression and slinked forward in a way even more unnerving than the previous posturing, “You’re not thinking of kicking Stevie out of your little superhero club, now are you?” He tilted his head to the side and stared at Tony, not blinking.

If they’d been in a car, Clint would have wrenched it over to the side, thrown it into park, and drawn a weapon. Unfortunately, planes didn’t work that way. Also, such an action would wreck the vehicle when Bruce inevitably got startled and shifted into the Hulk.

The tension in the cabin skyrocketed.

Abruptly it snapped as Tony threw himself back into a chair and gave a dramatic sigh, though he kept hard eyes locked on Barnes. “Of course not! As long as Steve knows the secret handshake he’s in. I’m just saying we can’t ignore this.”

Natasha cleared her throat. “No one’s saying we should kick out Steve. Captain America leads the Avengers. Having a teammate go Feral is a risk anyone who fights with a Sentinel takes, especially those of you fighting with a female Sentinel.” Natasha got a strange look on her face.

“What?” Tony prodded.

“A lot of things aren’t adding up and I’m confused. I don’t like being confused.” Natasha looked out the window, the corners of her mouth pinching. For a second she looked like she was going to say more, but then she shook her head and let the moment pass.

“Some things might be none of our business,” Clint said thoughtfully, “though that doesn’t mean I’m not curious.” His thoughts drifted and he found himself fighting back a smile. “Note that I haven’t said a thing about the white wolf.”

“You just did say something,” Natasha noted with disapproval. She had strange hangups about discussing manifesting spirit animals, maybe because partial Sentinels like them never got to interact with their animal companions except on the astral plane. The topic was one of the few things that almost always got under her skin, a point of irritation instead of pain, so Clint made a point of poking her about it whenever he had the chance.

Besides, the Winter Soldier being a Wolf Guide was just so crazy that it filled Clint with unholy glee, waiting to see how it all turned out. It was like watching a soap opera and reality tv show in one. Even better was how the stoic and buttoned-up Steve was turning into a wild card.

“What white wolf?” Tony demanded with annoyance, unable to see it as a mundane. “Or is that a euphemism?”

“Euphemism or not, everyone’s entitled to their own secrets,” Bruce said earnestly. “Maybe we should wait to have a conversation about what happened in the battle until Steve’s here too. It’ll give us time to clean up, calm down, and all get on the same page about events.”

“And on that note, here’s the hotel. Landing in thirty seconds,” Clint announced. Without further discussion, they tabled the subject.

After long showers and an early dinner, they regrouped at the quinjet to pick up Steve and fly back home. Landing at the hospital, Barnes jumped impatiently to his feet. “Natalia and I can pick up Steve while the rest of you wait.” 

“Natalia?” Clint mouthed, wondering if the two had a past outside of Steve Rogers. He had to stomp down on a spurt of inappropriate jealousy and bite his tongue. The last time he’d let his mouth run away with him about a man from Nat’s past, Clint had been the one getting stomped and stomped hard.

“Barnes just doesn’t want any witnesses for his tearful reunion with the Captain,” Tony called from where he lounged back with his feet up and a tablet in his hands.

“Is it too much to hope for a little kissy-face?” Clint mocked meanly, unable to help himself. “Probably. Poor Rogers, despite the murderous yet sultry advertising, Barnes has made a habit of leaving the guy hanging.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barnes scowled.

“We’re the ones who’ve been around Rogers the last few years, not you, buckaroo,” Tony said. “And the poor guy is totally in the closet and pining for you. It’s depressing.”

“Steve and I are just friends,” Barnes muttered resentfully, shifting impatiently in front of the door.

Clint snorted. “As an expert on eyesight, I can say this with authority. You are blind. The guy is head over heels for you. If you aren’t going to do something about it, you need to let Steve down gently. He doesn’t deserve to be hurt any more. He’s suffered enough.”

“I don’t think you understand the situation,” Barnes said tightly, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

Natasha uncrossed her legs and stood up. “Steve cares about everyone, but there aren’t many people he can make a personal connection with. He can probably count those still living on his fingers. You are the oldest and most important name on that list. Most of the time, Steve doesn’t seem to care if he lives or dies. He’s not actively suicidal, but he takes stupid risks. We can’t get him to stop, but maybe you could, if you’re willing to step up and be there for him. He needs you.”

“In other words, put out or get out, Barnes.” Tony sounded like he was joking, but his eyes were deadly serious. “Either stick around and help Steve or get lost so you don’t drive him off the deep end.” 

Hitting the button to open the door with his fist, Barnes glared around the cabin, “You all done?”

“For now, but I’ll put plans into place to pick up the pieces when you inevitably disappoint.” Tony arched one brow and then went back to his work dismissively.

To be honest, Clint was surprised that Barnes hadn’t swung at Tony yet. He obviously wanted to.

“James, let’s just go and get Steve,” Natasha said, going past him and onto the hospital roof. At her use of first names, Clint felt a sudden urge to take a swing at Barnes himself. 

Scowling, Barnes pivoted and followed her out.

“Next time, leave the matchmaking to a professional,” Bruce suggested tartly as the two disappeared inside the hospital.

* * *

 

Ten minutes later, a pissed off Black Widow called the jet. “Stark! When Jarvis told you Steve was admitted here, did you think to do any more checking? Because the only Steve Rogers they have in this place is a fifty-year old hispanic man with a combover from New Jersey.”

“What?!” Tony exclaimed, feet dropping to the floor from where he’d been lounging. “Jarvis, find me Captain Steven Grant Rogers, the right one! Search every hospital in Philly if you have to!”

* * *

 

Several hours later, they were no closer to finding Steve. The Avengers gathered back in the quinjet for a sitrep. Barnes had almost refused to stop looking to come, but even he had to admit that he’d hit a dead end. The terrified EMTs he’d tracked down had dropped Steve off, but once at the hospital, Steve had effectively disappeared. 

They were already tired from the previous battle and tempers were short.

“Once more, I’d like to apologize,” Jarvis said solemnly. “Neither the city’s hospital or morgue systems has any record of a Captain America or Steve Rogers, even with our more specific search criteria. Many of the intake files on victims from today’s fight were barely filled out and not electronically updated in a timely fashion. I tracked the ambulance through traffic cams and dashboard GPS, confirming that it reached to the hospital and that Captain Rogers was taken inside, but the trail ends there. Sergeant Barnes was unable to shake loose any further information.” 

“Once inside the hospital, Captain Rogers effectively disappeared. No cameras or witnesses caught sight of the Captain in the chaos. There were so many people being treated, the hospital started shipping patients to other area hospitals, but again, I can’t find any record or video of a man matching Captain Roger’s description being transferred.” 

“Ms. Romanov has searched the hospital with her Sentinel sense of smell, but couldn’t find Captain Rogers over the scent of disinfectants and the hundreds of people who tracked through the building today. Mr. Barton and Sergeant Barnes separated and did a visual sweep, but also failed to find anything. Due to higher than usual patient volume, memories of specific patients are hazy. Staff has also turned over since earlier in the day, making it even more difficult to find witnesses.”

Bruce flushed green and got a sick look of his face. “What if someone like General Ross grabbed him when we were all distracted?”

Lips pressed tight, Tony flipped rapidly through holographic projections of hacked patient records, looking for a clue. “Jarvis, widen record parameters to all males age 16 and up admitted today in either Philadelphia or towns in a thirty mile radius, irregardless of ailment. We can’t give up hope that he’s here somewhere. Meanwhile, we can start sniffing around for hints of a more sinister plot.”  

Slamming his fists on the table, making Bruce’s forehead bulge grotesquely green for a few seconds, Barnes looked around and snarled, “Are you serious right now? Haven’t you guys worked with Stevie for years? I thought you were a bunch of geniuses and spies.” He looked at Natasha most accusingly, but she just stared back at him blankly, weary and stressed. “Have none of you taken the time to see beyond the surface?” Barnes looked on the verge of breaking something or somebody. 

“Obviously not, since something has your panties in a twist. So fess up, buttercup. What are we missing?” Tony asked snidely. “Not that you’ve been around to see Rogers at all the last few years, but if you know how to find him, by all means, tell us! Otherwise, stop being a problem, shut up, and do what we tell you to do so we can find Steve!”

“Fine! The truth about Stevie is—” Barnes snapped hotly, only to be interrupted by the blasting ringtone of Johnny Cash’s Man in Black. He huffed.

Everyone glared at Clint with irritation.

“Hold on a sec, I’ve got to take this,” Clint said faintly, unsteadily lifting the phone and turning to give himself the illusion of privacy, walking away from the group. “Hello?”

Natasha, who’d been watching him very carefully from the second his phone had first rung, went tighter than a strung bow the second the voice on the other end of the line answered, a complicated expression flashing across her face. No one else could hear what was said, since Clint had the volume turned down low and had moved up front into the cockpit.

Everyone stared at him, waiting for an explanation. Clint ignored them, all his attention focused on the voice on the other end of the line. “That’s—that’s great…. Yeah, of course.” Clint swallowed hard and closed his eyes. “Okay, sure…. Sounds good. Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir. You too….”

Hanging up the phone, Clint took a deep breath before turning back to look at the team. “I know where Steve is.”

 


	14. Chapter 14

The clink of falling coins, followed by an almost familiar scent, roused Steve from sleep.

Steve felt groggy but better, more like herself after the rest. As the cobwebs cleared from her mind, she realized that she was wearing a dress and sleeping on the street like a homeless person. Someone had just put their hard-earned money in her water cup because she looked that bad off.

Mortified, Steve peeked out through her folded arms and the messy strands of her blond hair, but all she could see was a man’s empty hand and black-clad legs standing in front of a bright red car. Even though the scent wasn’t quite right, it still felt tantalizingly familiar; a name hovered on the tip of her tongue. In fact, the man felt so good to all her senses that she quickly realized that he was a Guide.

Didn’t make the situation any less embarrassing.

Mr. Black Slacks cleared his throat gently, “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but notice your bandages and well-used combat boots. Also your hyena, who’s currently making friends with Captain, my German Shepard. Captain’s a spirit guide, not a real dog, so he won’t play fetch with tennis balls, but as a powerful Sentinel, you probably already know that.”

The man paused for a moment, waiting for a reply, but she didn’t know what to even say. He continued earnestly. “If you’re having trouble with your senses, try focusing on the sound of my voice. I’ll keep talking and doing the Guide thing. I’ve only done this during training, but your hyena insisted I come over, so I watched you while you were sleeping. I mean... I was watching to make you weren’t zoning. I’m pretty sure that was just sleep. Your red dress also happens to match Lola, my red car.” He took a breath and shifted his weight. “Anyway, the name’s Phil Coulson. I’d like to help if I can.”

Hearing the name of the agent responsible for bringing the Avengers together with his supposed death, Steve froze instead of finally sitting up like she’d planned. No wonder the man smelled familiar, though it wasn’t quite the same. There was something alien now threading through his scent.

Months after the Battle of New York, the team had found out that Coulson had miraculously survived Loki’s spear through the heart, but no one from the team had seen him in the years since, not even Clint and Natasha, who’d been closest to him from their days on Shield’s Strike Team Delta.

Going down on one knee without regard for his expensive black slacks, Coulson continued in a calm and friendly manner. “I’m relatively new to being a Guide, but I’ve never met a Sentinel special enough to partner with a hyena spirit animal before. She’s amazing. I’ve been lucky enough to know several female Sentinels and many military veterans, so I’m sure you can take care of yourself, but I was wondering if there’s anything I can do to help? You deserve better than sleeping on the streets. Not to be immodest, but I spent most of my professional career as a problem solver.”

When Steve still didn’t answer, her mind spinning, Coulson settled back onto his heels. “Take your time thinking about it. I’m currently unemployed and trying to find myself, so I’m in no rush. Watching the news made me miss old friends, so I took Lola and Captain out for a spin on the off chance I’d see—well, it doesn’t matter who, though it’s gotten to the point that the way Lola flies down the road like a hawk and the bright red of her paint job in the side mirrors constantly reminds me of them. It’s rather ridiculous.” He looked away sheepishly, giving Steve the courage to finally sit up.

Pushing her hair back off her face and trying to finger comb it into some semblance of order, Steve cleared her throat. “I’m sure they’d appreciate hearing about that in person.”

Staring blankly at his red car, Coulson shrugged fatalistically. “They’re like stars and I’m planted on the ground. They don’t need me dragging them down.” Captain, his German Shepard, met Coulson’s eyes with fondness and sympathy from where he sat in the backseat of the car. Joan the hyena leaned against Captain’s side and snorted, probably with annoyance at how humans made things so complicated.

“Sometimes it’s nice to meet friends in the middle,” Steve suggested gently.

Lips twisting wryly, Coulson turned back. “Here I came over to try and help you, and there you go helping me. I knew you were a good person. How do you feel about ice cream? There’s a Baskin Robbins just down the street. You can’t say no to 31 flavors. There has to be at least one that you and the... hyena... will... like.” Voice failing as his eyes widened comically, Coulson turned white and then flushed red as he looked Steve up and down slowly.

“Captain Rogers?” he finally asked, voice faint. He shot a look over at Joan the hyena and then back at Steve wearing a red dress, blinking rapidly. He’d completely lost his usual composure.

“Agent Coulson,” Steve said blandly, rising to her feet and looking down at the agent as if there was nothing unusual about the situation.

Scrambling up, though he was still shorter than Steve when standing, Coulson took a deep breath and visibly rebuilt his famous calm. “Just Coulson now, or Phil, if you’d do me the honor. I’m not a SHIELD agent anymore.”

Phil turned to search up and down the street. A frown grew on his lips. “Does your team know you’re out here? They should be taking care of you. How did this even happen? And does that also mean no one’s keeping Clint from throwing himself recklessly off buildings? I was told you’d become a tight-knit team who’d gotten over the egos and looked out for each other.” He turned back to her with concern and a hint of temper shining from his eyes.

“It’s been a difficult day,” Steve said simply. “How about that ice cream?” Bending over, she scooped up her cup and shook it, making the coins jingle. “It sounds like enough for a scoop, maybe even two.”

Biting back further questions, Phil nodded sharply and gestured down the street. “Baskin Robbins is this way, Captain.”

Once inside, Phil insisted on buying them scoops of all thirty-one flavors to share, not letting Steve pay for even one. Feeling guilty, Steve emptied her change cup into the tip jar. From the corner of her eye, she saw the girls behind the counter elbowing each other and whispering. She couldn’t help but eavesdrop with her Sentinel hearing as she walked away.

“And that is why I should’ve eaten my Wheaties growing up!”

“Not even daily cans of spinach and Jillian Michaels on speed dial could turn us into a Xena like that.”

“Do you think she needs a Gabrielle? Wait, never mind. I’m not ready to give up eating sweets to pull off that crop top.”

Shaking her head at all the pop culture names flying over her head, Steve followed Phil to a booth in the back.

Conversation flowed surprisingly well and they easily decimated half of the ice cream cups. Popping a small spoonful of purple and blue swirl into his mouth, Phil made a happily disgusted sound, tossing the spoon into their growing trash pile. “Yuck, no thanks. I’ve always wanted to try all the less popular flavors, but I’ve never had the excuse and at my age, I have to watch my diet if I don’t want to end up with a spare tire like my Uncle Mort.” A distracted look drifted across his face. “Though I haven’t had weight problems since they woke me up.”

Scraping out the last bite of tingly pink and red peppermint ice cream, Steve cautiously prompted, “Woke you up?” So far, they’d avoided any heavy topics of conversation and Steve didn’t want to inadvertently break some unspoken rule about it. Phil must have herculean levels of restraint to not press Steve about the dress, the hyena, or sleeping on the streets. Then again, she felt relaxed enough that she was getting to the point where she wanted to talk about it, so maybe that had been his plan all along.

Phil began shredding his napkin methodically. “After dying while fighting Loki, I didn’t expect to wake up again. They used alien technology to keep me alive. It changed me in ways I still don’t completely understand.”

Looking down to pick out the nuts in her pralines and cream, Steve quietly admitted, “I didn’t expect to wake up after dying in that plane either. Sometimes, I would’ve preferred not to.”

“Exactly,” Phil said, relief instead of censure or shock in his voice. “You get it. I gave up everything for the greater good, but then they woke me up, changed my reality, and shoved me right back out into the fight without asking or caring about how I felt about it. I guess the greater good is called that for a reason, but sometimes I wish people would care a little more about the little guy.”

“Yes,” Steve said, amazed. Their eyes met in a moment of perfect understanding. A hurt hidden deep in Steve’s soul mended at knowing there was someone out there who understood her so well, that it wasn’t just her.

The bell on the door jingled, breaking the moment.

Clearing his throat, Phil took a bite of green ice cream—either pistachio, lime, or mint, Steve had lost track—and continued. “A little over a year after I woke up, it seemed like my alien cure was expiring. I started having crippling headaches, strange impulses, and other problems. I didn’t want my friends and teammates to have to see me die twice or, to be honest, to risk them trying to fix me again and making things even worse, so I quit the job and went on vacation in Tahiti, readying myself to die for good this time. I discovered completely by accident that I was actually coming Online as a late-onset Guide. I’m trained and everything’s stabilized now, but once again, life feels different. I feel different.”

Waving his spoon, Phil gave Steve a quirky smile. “If you can’t go back, you have to find a new way forward.”

Drawing a pattern into her chocolate ice cream, Steve lost her courage at the last moment and instead lamely said, “I’m surprised SHIELD let you go.”

“I trained my people well. They’re ready and able to save the world, they just needed to realize how amazing they are even without me there holding the flag and pointing the way. That and I didn’t give them a choice about my leaving,” Phil said, a sad but resolute look in his eyes. “It was what I needed going forward if I was going to survive. The person I was, denying certain parts of me, it was killing me. I need to be a better person, a more complete, happier person. I spent so long doing things for the greater good that I’d forgotten how to want things for myself. It’s easier to be in control when you don’t want much.” Steve nodded in understanding.

Phil shifted uncomfortably. “You see, when I felt an inconvenient emotion, I suppressed it so I could focus on my work. I thought I had to if I wanted to really help people. That doesn’t work anymore as a Guide. In fact, it’s toxic. I never realized how much more there was to the world until I came Online, how many assumptions I’d made. I want to try doing things for Phil for a change instead of always minimizing Phil’s needs to fit the image of some perfect Agent Coulson. I think Phil could also do a lot of good in the world. I want to give him a chance to try.” Suddenly self-conscious, Phil looked down, missing Steve’s gobsmacked expression.

Steve felt like she’d just been hit in the head with a sledgehammer.  Everything he said resonated perfectly with what she’d been feeling lately, substituting in the words Stevie for Phil and Captain America for Agent Coulson. Maybe it was time to give Stevie the chance to save the day without hiding behind the masks, let Stevie fight as Captain America, let Stevie honestly bare her heart to her friends and even swallow her pride for an honest talk with Bucky. She wanted to give everyone, herself included, the chance to get to know the real Stevie. Didn’t they all deserve that? Didn’t Stevie deserve a chance to try?

“I know what you mean.” Steve felt breathless, both scared and exhilarated to admit it out loud.

Looking up, Phil gave an awkward shrug. “Thank you. To start, I want to apologize to you, Captain Rogers.”

Confused, Steve shook her head. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Phil thinned his lips. “No, I do. I spent my entire life admiring and living up to the legacy of Captain America, so much that I let it dazzle me when I met up with the real person. I made a fool of myself, but I was so excited to meet my hero Captain America that I didn’t take the time to look at the person behind the starred shield. I’d like to start over, if you’re willing, right here in this ice cream parlor. I’m ready to see you as you are and not just my assumptions, like how you’re not really a fake Sentinel, despite what the propaganda and history books teach. A fake Sentinel wouldn’t have a spirit animal as a companion or feel like one of the strongest minds I’ve ever met. Then there’s how I assumed you were just a homeless female Sentinel forced to sleep out on the streets instead of, well, you. So this is me, putting aside assumptions and ready to meet whomever you want to show me.”

Once again, Steve felt bowled over. With just a few words Phil had independently confirmed one of her secret dreams. Steve was a _real_ Sentinel, not a fake after all. Her instincts were real and trustworthy.

Added to that, Phil wanted to meet Steve’s true self, not just the mask and the myth.

Stevie had a chance to step up out of the shadows and this—this was a tipping point.

Phil held out his hand over the rainbow of half-melted ice cream cups and smiled. “Hello, my name’s Phil, short for Phillip J. Coulson, currently unemployed, newly Online Guide, and retired agent of SHIELD. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Slowly reaching out to shake his hand, Steve pushed through a lifetime of lies with an exhilarating rush. “If we’re going to start over again, if you really want to meet me stripped of assumptions, than you’d be the first person in a very long time. Even when I first met Sam—who’s great, he’s amazing, don’t get me wrong—even Sam made assumptions that I went along with. To be _what_ I am, I’ve always had to be _who_ they tell me to be,” she cautioned.

“I’m not telling you to be anyone,” Phil said comfortably, squeezing her hand once before letting go. “In fact, I’m asking _you_ to tell _me_ who you are, who you’d like to be.”

“It’s hard to start,” Steve admitted haltingly, her fingers dropping to twist in her lap.

“Then start small. Or not at all. No pressure.” Picking up a clean spoon, Phil took a small bite of cookies and cream ice cream, eyebrows lifting in surprise at the taste. Taking a second, larger bite, he waited.

“Well, to start... I think I am a real Sentinel, like you said. They’ve always told me that I’m not real, that it’s just the serum enhancing my senses and everything else is imagined in my head, but I think the serum only switched me from latent to active.”

“You feel real to me.”

“Thank you.” Steve took a slow breath. “I think I want to stop being fake.”

“Good luck. As I’ve said, I’m working on that goal myself. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

“Listening is good, so is believing me. So… I think I need to speak a truth that I’ve been told to hide. Even though the people giving the orders are no longer in charge, I’ve kept the party line for the supposed greater good and because it seemed easier and safer.” Swallowing, Steve tried to get the words to come out.

Curiosity racing behind his eyes, Phil put down his spoon and sat back. “I’m listening.”

“It’s probably not what you’re thinking,” Steve said, giving herself another moment.

He tilted his head in acknowledgement and quirked his lips. “Well, I’m trying not to make assumptions, but it’s a hard habit to break, especially considering the unusual circumstances of today’s meeting.”

“Admittedly, but so is lying,” Steve said wryly. “Here we go.” Taking a deep breath, she said, “It’s nice to meet you, Phil. You’re welcome to call me Steve or Stevie, though my ma named me Stephanie Grania Rogers. The government changed my name legally to Steven Grant Rogers when awarding my Captaincy and sending me on the Captain America USO tour, though I’d been going by Steve for years by then back in Brooklyn to get enough work to afford food and my medicines.”

Phil nodded slowly, none of his thoughts about the revelation showing on his face. “It’s an honor to meet you, Steve. Stevie,” he stumbled for a moment, his calm facade cracking for a split second. “Are you sure you don’t have a preference on name?”

“I’m used to Steve after all these years,” she shrugged, “but I… I miss being Stevie sometimes. Only Bucky calls me that anymore. It might be nice to figure that out?” Steve meant to end that sentence as a statement, but it slipped out more as a question. Shaking her head briskly, she decided, “Let’s just stay with Steve for now. If we’re going to be friends, that’s probably less confusing and I’m used to it.”

Giving a funny little laugh, Phil shook his head and smiled to himself. Steve looked at him in confusion and budding offense. She hated being laughed at.

“No, sorry, I’m not laughing at you, Steve,” Phil said. “It’s just that Captain America being a real female Sentinel shifts everything I thought I knew, but doesn’t actually change anything important. You’re still a hero and someone I look up to. You’re even more heroic in some ways, to tell the truth. I’m glad you told me. Thank you.”

Relaxing back at his explanation, Steve gave him a small, grateful smile. “Thank you for listening.” Steve actually felt content for once. It was strange, but nice.

Leaning forward, Phil tried to lighten the atmosphere. “I bet Natasha loves having another woman on the team, though I could see Tony being annoying and inappropriate about it. How’s that working out?”

“Yeah, about that…” Steve looked away with a wince. “I haven’t told them.” Over Coulson’s shocked and disapproving inhale, Steve rushed to add, “But I want to! Especially after telling you, I think I’m ready to talk to them and deal with the fallout. Today’s been a kick in the pants from the universe telling me to stop hiding.”

When she looked back at Phil, he’d composed his expression. “Alright, is that something you’d like my help with? I’d be happy to mediate the conversation and split their focus with my reappearance.” He gave a modest shrug. “As mentioned, I’m at loose ends right now, but I did specialize in conflict resolution with strong and aggressive personalities.”  

“I don’t need to see your resume, Phil,” Steve said, though the idea of having an ally for the conversation with her team, someone calmer and less prone to violence than Bucky, did appeal.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Steve abruptly committed. “They’re probably still too busy to wonder where I got to after the battle ended. Hopefully they didn’t try to visit me in the hospital, only to find me gone.” Other people could pull stunts like that, but not Steve. “Could you call them to come and pick us up in the jet? I don’t have my phone and I think I’m done eating ice cream.”

“Of course. I still have the important numbers memorized.” Phil got to his feet. “I’ll step outside to make the phone call while you throw away our trash.”

Steve tossed the ice cream and stepped into the bathroom to wash her hands and relieve herself. The face staring back at her in the mirror was smudged with dirt, but alive in a way Steve barely recognized. It looked good on her. From now on she’d be true to herself. Steve would fight to be herself. She might lose friends in the process, but if she did, they’d never been true friends in the first place.

Nodding sharply to the reflection in the mirror, Steve straightened the fall of her hospital gown and dress, wiped her face clean, and finger combed her hair. As ready as she’d ever be, she left to join Phil outside. “We good to go?” she asked, not quite managing to hide a tremor of trepidation.

Phil nodded. “We’re going to meet the quinjet in a park a few miles away that has enough space to land. That’ll give you a chance to ride in Lola. She’s a real classic of a car with a few special upgrades,” he gave a crooked grin and gestured Steve forward.

Turning, the two of them walked side-by-side down the street.


	15. Chapter 15

 

Stevie Rogers came back to the Avengers as an openly female Sentinel Captain and would not be shamed for it. Fighting had always been a way of life, first in Brooklyn, then in the War, and now as an Avenger. Along the way she’d forgotten that fighting dirty wasn’t the only way to live. Sometimes the best way to fight was to hold your head up high and embrace the truth.

Phil’s red corvette turned into the park where the quinjet waited in a field. He spoke, breaking Steve from her thoughts, “Oh good, Stark’s quinjet has enough space for Lola. I was afraid I’d have to leave her behind or find somebody trustworthy to fly her up for me. She does fly, you know.” He gave Steve a proud look. “She’s not just a normal Chevy corvette under the hood, but,” the cargo ramp on the quinjet lowered for them to drive inside, “those are secrets for another day.” Phil drove the car up the ramp and parked. 

There was just enough space to open the car doors without scratching the paint. Stepping out, Steve squared her shoulders and walked forward, her red dress fluttering around her legs in a way both foreign and liberating. Phil fell in by her side, his arm brushing hers in a reminder of support. 

Up front in the passenger area, the team stood watching them with varying expressions of shock and confusion. Steve had worried that Nat would start in on the accusations of lying right away, but the redhead was too busy staring at Phil, whom she hadn’t seen in years. Most likely the team had been too busy mopping up the battle to even notice Steve was missing from the hospital. 

Maybe this would be easy.

Bucky immediately quashed that hope as he stalked forward aggressively. “Where the hell have you been?!” He sent Phil a slashing look before turning back to Steve. “We’ve been scouring every hospital in Philly, looking for you!”

Steve winced. “Sorry.”

Before Bucky could find words over the growl choking in his throat, Tony decided to butt in and make himself the center of attention, cutting off Bucky’s advance as he sauntered forward towards Steve. “We’ve been going crazy with worry and here you are wearing a scarlet dress and sneaking out on dates with older men. For shame, young Rogers! On the other hand, Agent Coulson probably just fulfilled a lifelong wet dream by going out on a date with Captain America, though I have to wonder if anybody expected the crossdressing. I know I didn’t.” 

Steve shifted uncomfortably, only to notice that Bucky, Clint, and Natasha had all tensed at the word  _ date _ , their eyes jumping to how close Phil and Steve were standing. When Captain and Joan, the two spirit animals, settled down comfortably together on Lola’s hood to watch the action, Clint’s eyes widened and Nat actually paled. Bucky went blank. Steve found all her carefully rehearsed explanations disappearing in a puff of smoke as she rushed to clarify. “There was no date.”  

Leaning closer to Steve instead of farther away, Phil gave the rest of the team a bland smile. A muscle in Bucky’s jaw twitched worryingly. “Except for when we shared ice cream and talked. That was really nice, wasn’t it?” Phil said.

Steve couldn’t help the softening of her features at Phil’s question. It had been nice. It was, in fact, one of the reasons Steve was standing here about to have this open and honest conversation with everyone.

Crossing his arms unhappily, Bucky’s metal limb served as a gleaming reminder that this wasn’t the charming rascal of her youth. This was a complex man, a man Steve couldn’t always predict anymore. Did that expression mean Bucky was jealous, irritated, or impatient? 

“Now I really have to get the details,” Tony said, wagging his brows, “but first—” stepping forward, he reached out and pulled an unsuspecting Phil into a hug. “I want to act all mad at you for faking your death and avoiding us afterwards, but it’s too good to see you actually alive in the flesh, Agent. Pepper’s going to be delighted. We missed you.” 

Giving a surprised yet pleased laugh, Phil hugged Tony back. “Thank you. It’s just Coulson or Phil now. I’m not a SHIELD agent anymore. It’s good to see you again, too, good to see all of you.” 

Sweeping his eyes across the team, he lingered for a moment on where Clint and Nat were standing next to each other. For some reason, they weren’t rushing forward to greet their friend and former handler. Steve didn’t get it, but she had too many other things to worry about right now.

Tony smiled with good cheer and leaned back. “Come and stay in my tower. I’ll give you your own suite, no, make that your own floor! Jarvis, put that into motion for me, will you? Get the man a floor of his own.”

“Very good, Sir, and welcome back, Mr. Coulson.” Jarvis said in a warm and cultured tone of voice.

After being released by Tony, Phil was passed to Bruce for a handshake and shoulder clasp. 

Nat finally stepped forward and embraced Phil, hiding her expression in his shoulder. The corners of Phil’s eyes creased in pleasure tinged with regret as he dipped his head into her embrace and sighed. Nat moved back after a brief but firm hug. “Your base scent is different,” she said in soft confusion.

Phil’s expression fell. He didn’t look over at where Clint, the final Avenger, had yet to step forward to greet him, touching his fingers to his chest and then dropping them as if burned, hand fisting. “I know, long story. Sentinels who used to know me before… well, from  _ before _ can find it offputting. I’m sorry.” 

“You still smell good, Sir. Just different,” Nat said seriously, meeting his eyes steadily.

Shifting, the tips of his ears going pink, Phil looked down. “Thanks, though you don’t owe me a Sir anymore.”

Lips quirking, Nat leaned forward. “I’ll always owe you, though if that’s the case, Phil, you’re welcome to call me Nat now.” 

Turning gracefully, she grabbed the unsuspecting Clint’s shirt and yanked hard. Clint tripped forward. Before he could face plant on the floor, the two men reached out and caught each other’s arms. “Thanks for stopping my fall,” Clint said breathlessly, staring down at their interlocked forearms instead of meeting Phil’s eyes. 

“Well, I do have a lot of practice,” Phil said, slowly sliding his fingers off Clint’s arms as he stepped back.

Steve couldn’t help but notice the way the fair hairs on Clint’s arm lifted at the touch in a wave of goosebumps. “My nose isn’t enhanced, so you smell the same to me. It’s good to have you back, good to  _ see _ you again.” Clint swallowed hard and looked at Phil’s face for only a moment, something vulnerable flashing in his eyes, before glancing away. “Since when have you been a Guide? I didn’t even know you were latent,” Clint’s voice cracked on the question as he looked over at Natasha. She shook her head, communicating that she hadn’t known either.

Expression going flat, Phil crossed his arms behind his back. “I was dormant, not latent. Torture tends to do that to Guides. I had a bad experience overseas, thought talking about it again was a moot point. Turns out that there’s a cure for some of us if the spirit animal can manage to survive the separation and something happens to rip open the mental scar tissue trapping us on opposite planes.”

“That sounds traumatic,” Tony said awkwardly.

Wrapping his arms around himself, Bruce looked down. “I always suspected that I had the potential to be a Guide, but the version of the serum I got twisted it so I don’t really sense any emotions now except for anger. I wanted to blame all my problems on the serum, but really it was in me all along. The other guy has always been there inside me, whether I want him there or not. It’s one of the reasons I tend to avoid reflections.” 

Into the heavy silence dropped Bucky’s Brooklyn drawl. "So that explains the messy hair. I thought it was just a scientist thing.”

“Or that Bruce and the other guy hate both combs and tangles,” Clint chimed in, doing his part to lighten the atmosphere. “I wouldn’t blame him. There’s a reason I keep my hair so short, and fashion ain’t it.”

“Wait a second, back up. Is Coulson saying that the wacky rumors about the Gifted having invisible animals friends always by their side are true?” Tony asked with skepticism. “I thought only Feral Sentinels and Shamans did the animal spirit thing.”

Clint threw out his arms dramatically. “I’ve only mentioned the hyena and wolf how many times? Now there’s a German Shepard. Don’t you ever listen to me?”

Annoyed, Tony glared. “You never  _ explained _ the hyena or wolf, which I can’t see, much less a dog! For all I know, they’re as unimportant as your rambling about finding stale pizza in your apartment in Bed Stuy and wondering if food poisoning is really that scary considering the marvels of modern medicine and flushing toilets.”

As the two began squabbling, Phil turned to Bucky and held out his hand, a bashful yet determined look on his face. “Sergeant Barnes, it’s a real honor to actually meet you. I’ve read all your biographies and after action reports that survived. Not in a creepy way, I just like history... and Captain America.” Bucky’s frown deepened, but under Steve’s expectant look, he slowly held out his metal hand. 

Seizing it with both hands without a moment of hesitation, Phil shook it enthusiastically and then forgot to let go as he gushed, “I’ve always admired the job you did as an NCO looking after the Howling Commandos and Captain America—” Steve had to suppress a smile at how Bucky seemed confused on whether to be flattered or use his combat training to escape the tight grip “—keeping them supplied so far behind enemy lines, maintaining morale, and reigning in as much as possible the crazy impulses of an international team. You served as an inspiration for me when trying to handle free spirits such as Agent Barton.”

“Hey!” Clint cried, turning. “I resent that remark! Also resemble, but the resentment is there.”

Startling at the interruption, Phil finally realized he was still clutching Bucky’s hand. He let go with a blush and stepped back, clearing his throat. “You’ve taken what happened to you over the years and refused to let it break you, instead redefining yourself with a code of honor and dedication to making the world a better place in your own unique way. This last year, your actions in Belize and Guatemala  _ alone _ —well, you know what you did. It’s just such an honor, Sergeant Barnes. An honor.” Clearing his throat, Phil shoved his hands into his pockets.

Bemused, Bucky tilted his head to the side. “Thanks.”

Starting to optimistically think she’d actually dodged the hard questions, Steve suddenly found herself pinned by Tony’s assessing stare. “So Rogers, back to you. Give, what’s with the costume?”

Steve looked down. “The dress? This isn’t a costume. This is the real me.”  Bucky nodded minutely in acknowledgement of her words, shifting smoothly so he could keep a watchful eye on the rest of the Avengers, protecting Steve’s back, just like always. Hopefully it wouldn’t be necessary. Raising her head up proudly, Steve looked around, meeting everyone’s eyes. 

After a beat of silence, Bruce raised his hand. “I’m confused. Are you telling us you’re transgender?”

“Cap probably doesn’t know what the word transgender even means,” Tony said slowly, brow furrowing. “I don’t think they even had that word until the ‘70s, though I’m not sure what they called it back in his day. Did they say transvestite? Permanent crossdresser? Girly man? Not that anyone could or should call you girly.”

Natasha clenched her fists by her side, spots of red high on her cheeks even as her voice went arctic cold. “I kept dismissing my instincts because I couldn’t believe you’d lie like that, especially not to the team. I can’t believe it took you this long to tell us, to tell  _ me _ . Out of everyone, you could have told me.” 

Guilt stabbed at Steve, making her tongue run away from her. “I had my reasons, but… I’m telling you now. I hope we can stay friends and keep working together doing what we do best. Saving people as Avengers.”

Whirling away to look out the dark window, Natasha grimaced. “I feel like an idiot. I am the Black Widow. I do not make mistakes like this.”

“Then we’re all idiots,” Clint said with a bemused look. “Things I saw and sensed made me suspect it a few times, but I ignored my instincts and bought stock in the public facade.”

“We all did,” Natasha growled, still visibly upset, but trying to contain herself. Phil took a slow step in her direction and met her eyes evenly. After a moment, she sighed, the lines on her face lessening. He nodded in approval.

“I’m still lost,” Bruce said, scratching his head.

Steve felt lucky that the shock and tension wasn’t turning Bruce green, only to realize it probably wasn’t luck. Phil was sending soothing vibes through the cabin with his Guide gift, keeping emotions from getting too high. Brow furrowed, Bucky was trying to copy him with limited success. His efforts kept Steve from hyperventilating, but didn’t seem to be making much headway with anyone else. 

“Why don’t we start flying to New York while we continue this conversation instead of waiting for a parking ticket for landing in a city park?” Phil gave Clint an expectant look. “Barton?”

Crossing his arms, Clint pursed his lips. “Although my knee-jerk reaction is to just say, ‘Yes, Sir,’ you technically aren’t my boss anymore.”

Arching one brow, Phil blandly asked, “Are you saying it’s a bad idea?”

“Nooo,” Clint shuffled awkwardly and then sighed, admitting, “I just don’t want to be left out of the conversation and the chance to give my two cents.”

“Am I correct in assuming you’ve seen the truth of Captain Roger’s situation?” Phil asked. Clint nodded, a resigned look creeping onto his face, as if he knew this was only delaying the inevitable. 

Phil hummed thoughtfully. “Barton, if you’ve both forgotten how to eavesdrop and stopped making inappropriate comments over the com, a lot of people would be shocked, myself included. I’d also insist on Nat checking to make sure you haven’t been brainwashed again.”

Natasha tilted her head and gave Clint the once over. “A hard hit to the head worked wonders last time.” 

“Ha ha. I’m glad to see you both have my back, but no thanks. Nat hits too hard.” Giving a mocking salute, Clint turned and bounded into the cockpit. He turned back at the last minute with an earnest look on his face, glancing over Phil’s head to find Steve. “Steve, I just want to remind you that I was the one who voted to keep Mulan. We’re good, right?” 

“Yeah, we’re good,” Steve nodded, grateful that Clint was making it so easy.

As the quinjet’s engines rumbled in preparation for takeoff, Tony gave a gusty sigh. “Why do they both seem to get it. Is it being professional spies? Do you get it yet?” he asked Bruce.

Bruce frowned, but gave Steve a thoughtful look. “No, but I want to. Steve’s earned that.” Sitting down in a chair for takeoff, Bruce asked, “Do you have a preferred pronoun, Rogers?”

Wrinkling her brow, Steve said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I,” Tony said in a singsong tone of voice. “Is anyone ever going to explain things?”

Bruce looked over. “From the transgender people I’ve talked to, those whose physical bodies don’t match their mental gender identity,” he defined to Steve in an aside before turning back to the room, “some want to be called a pronoun different from the one given to them at birth in conversation. Some prefer  _ he _ , some  _ she _ , and others  _ they _ , representing the dual nature they live with daily.”

“Oh,” Steve said thoughtfully. “That’s interesting, sort of like what the nurse at the hospital was asking. I wouldn’t label myself as transgender, but I can see how that would be useful. I think I’d like ‘ _ she _ ’ going forward, but I won’t be offended if you still call me ‘he.’”

“The bearded lady in the circus still went by ‘she,’ even with the beard,” Clint chimed in from the front. 

“Excuse me, Sir,” Jarvis interrupted apologetically, “but Ms. Potts wanted personal confirmation of your healthy state and to know if you made up your mind about Japanese or fried chicken. You set up repeated notifications on her calendar to order food for you when I detected you were less than fifteen minutes out. She’s agreed to do it this time, but wants you to know that the next time you can do it yourself or starve, as she is no longer your administrative assistant. In defense of Ms. Potts, I am more than able to order food for you instead so that Ms. Potts can focus on more important matters, Sir.”

“What’s more important than me?” At the disapproving stares, Tony waved his hand. “Pepper loves it. Jarvis, tell her to order fried chicken. This is a fried chicken day, with all of the sides, even cheese curds if they have it. Considering my tip, they better have it. Get enough for everyone, the usual Avengers plus our two guests.”

“Very good, Sir,” Jarvis acknowledged.

“Also tell Pep I love her and send her an emoji with a kissing face. You know what? Send her a hundred kissing emojis. End it with the candy one, so she can smile at the thought without being tempted by the sugar. She’s already going to be mad enough about the friend chicken and cheese curds. Make sure you set aside some cheese curds just for her when they get there and keep them hot. Don’t let us eat them all before she gets some,” Tony ordered.

Despite how it looked to the public, Steve knew Tony and Pepper had a strong and devoted relationship. They complimented each other. Pepper had mastered dealing with Tony’s genius, demons, and the complicated twists of his personality. She protected his vulnerabilities and bolstered his strengths. Pepper gave Tony unflinching truth, and in return, Tony had come to love her more than the arc reactor in his chest powering his suit and keeping him alive. 

Steve really admired Pepper, aspiring to be just as unflinching. 

In revealing her truths, Steve also had to acknowledge that she wanted to have Bucky by her side, not just for a visit, but for always, and not just as a best friend, but as her everything. Even just thinking about opening her mouth and admitting it out loud scared her. It would change things and throw her into uncharted territory. Once said, she couldn’t take it back. If she scared him off, she’d never forgive herself.

But all the best things in her life came from taking risks and refusing to quit.

As Tony signed off with Jarvis, Steve called on all of her courage to turn and face Bucky.  Immediately noticing her scrutiny, he met her gaze curiously and waited. She’d always kept him waiting. 

Not any more.

Everything else but the man in front of her disappeared. All of her enhanced senses focused on cataloging the physicality of Bucky Barnes. It was both exciting and immensely comforting. She had everything about him memorized, even down to the pattern of his skin cells. In fact, Steve realized, she was only a hair's breadth away from a full imprint and soul bonding. 

In all the world, she’d never met a man more sweet-smelling and good-looking than Bucky Barnes. His blue eyes and dimpled chin defined the masculine ideal. His voice sent tingles down her spine. When he moved or danced, angels wept with envy. 

Even more than that, though, Bucky was kind and generous, loyal and true, more dependable than the rising and setting of the sun. When he made mistakes, he owned up to them and tried to make it right. He worked hard without complaint and supported Stevie no matter what he really thought about her choices. Even when she’d had nothing, she’d had Bucky. If he’d been telling the truth back in her apartment this morning, he really did care for her, had always cared for her… maybe even as much as she’d always secretly loved and cared about him.

Breath coming faster, Steve looked at the man, at the Guide that her soul cried out for, and tried not to panic at the thought of screwing this up and losing him. Sentinel Captains didn’t panic. Seeing her state, Bucky straightened up from his slouch against the wall, blue eyes going sharp as ice chips. 

Before she could faint, Steve just blurted it out. “I’m going to stop lying to you, James Buchanan Barnes.” 

Brows rising high, Bucky tilted his head to the side. “Of course I’d appreciate that, but that sounds like a pretty tall order, Stevie.” His lips quirked as if at a private joke as he veiled his eyes with those unfairly long eyelashes. “I don’t want you to strain yourself. You might want to chew on it a while longer to make sure you really mean whatever you’re going to say. You’ve already unloaded a lot of truth today and giving in isn’t something you ever really learned how to do, a lot like shining shoes. ”

Steve hated it when Bucky doubted her and hated being laughed at her. Her lips firmed as she drew herself up. “I’m going to say this in front of everyone so you know I really mean it, that I’m not giving in to anything. Instead, I’m going to start fighting my hardest for something I’ve always wanted. I was just too chicken to do anything about it before now.” Sucking in a breath, she announced, “I love you, Bucky. I’ve always loved you.” 

Mouth dropping open, Bucky stared at her in awed silence. 

In fact, everyone had gone silent, listening breathlessly to Steve bare her heart and potentially shatter it if this went badly. 

Fisting her hands by her sides, she jutted out her chin and tightened her abs. “I’d like to court, if you’re willing.” It came out a little shrill and sounded more like a challenge to fight than an invitation to date. Steve held her breath to keep from hyperventilating.

Expression unfurling like a blooming flower and eyes shining like twin suns seen from underwater, Bucky licked his lips and moved forward a step. “Courting with intent?” he asked softly.

From the side, Tony cooed, “Aw, I didn’t know Barnes could make that expression. He looks like those little Japanese—what are they called?” He snapped his fingers. “Chibis, that’s it. He looks like a chibi Winter Soldier. Is someone recordi— _ mmph _ !” 

Ignoring Tony, Steve nodded firmly to Bucky’s question and took a careful step forward herself, closing the distance. Her Brooklyn accent thickened as she answered, “Yes, with intent. If everything works out, I’d be honored to make an honest man outta ya, if those papers from before you shipped out are still valid after almost eighty years.”

Bucky’s face looked vulnerable, as stripped of masks as Steve’s. “They never expired, not for you.” Swallowing hard, he asked in a rush, “What about bonding? Are you going to make me wait to earn that, even though we’re finally both Online?”

Barely shoving down the primitive need to just pounce on the man and place a claiming bite on him in front of witnesses, Steve tried not to be selfish. “If I bond with you, Buck, and you changed your mind later about what you need, I don’t think I could let you go. I want you to be sure,” she said nobly. The words felt like shards of glass as they left her throat, but Bucky’s happiness was more important. 

Bucky snorted, all of his vulnerability vanishing like a puff of steam, leaving behind a powerful man with the eyes and body of a predator. He closed the remaining space between them in a blink and snatched up Steve’s hand in a grip of iron, even though the arm he used was made of flesh and bone. Their hands gripped each other tightly, fitting together perfectly like they’d been molded as one piece and only broken apart later.

That touch of skin on skin sealed his fate. All her noble resistance crumbled like a sand castle before the marauding tide. Stevie was never letting him go now. 

Never.

Bucky looked down at their linked hands, his eyelashes clumping wetly, and scowled. “You dumb punk, I hate it when you go all self-sacrificing. I’ve been sure of you since the day we met as kids. If you haven’t noticed it yet, I’m not ever gonna let  _ you _ go.” 

He grimaced and turned his head to the side. “Especially not after seeing you drive up in some besotted guy’s red corvette looking like a million bucks.” 

“I told you, it wasn’t a date,” Steve said weakly, having trouble focusing on words over the blissful sensation of having Bucky so close and impassioned and actually touching her.

“Stevie, you went stepping out with a single man who’s an unbonded Guide, so if I somehow haven’t made it abundantly clear to your thick block of a head, let me say it once again before the next one shows up with a ring.” 

Using his metal hand to grab her behind the neck in a whisper-soft grip, Bucky pressed their foreheads together and looked deep into her eyes. “I want you to keep me. I want you as my Sentinel and my wife. I want you, whomever you want to be: Steve or Stevie or Captain America. I’ll take all of ‘em or none of ‘em if you want to be someone else now, just as long as I get to be there with you as you figure it out. I love you. I’m here waiting for you, so  _ take _ me, take all the frost-bitten, distorted pieces of me and keep me. I’ll spend the rest of my life watching your back, fighting by your side, and making sure you don’t regret it.”

Sniffling, Stevie found her eyes filling with tears. “Okay, Buck, okay. I give in. You win.” She would compromise for him, would listen and fight and do whatever she had to do to make this work.

“We both win,” he insisted, shaking her gently by the nape and bringing their clasped hands up between their chests to resonate with the joyful duet of their beating hearts.

Smiling, Stevie nodded, relief and euphoria swelling in her breast. “We both win,” she agreed. Chuckling wetly, she sniffled and then arched her brow as alluringly as possible. “And to the victors go the spoils.”

Instantly catching her meaning, Bucky flashed her a grin. 

Leaning forward, they met in the middle for a kiss, and this time, it was absolutely perfect. 


	16. Epilogue

**** Their lips met with soft pressure, sliding across each other in gentle greeting. Directing her with tender nudges, Bucky taught Steve how to kiss like a master, building the heat between them until she felt like she was melting with desire. Slowly he coaxed her to lips to make their own demands. It was an invitation she was helpless to resist. 

Warm breath puffed against her lips as Bucky sighed against her mouth and tipped his head back at the nudge of her fingers, all that deadly strength and iron will kept docile by love and trust. Honoring that surrender, Steve sipped delicately at his plush bottom lip, tracing it lovingly with her tongue before slipping inside the rich cavern of his mouth for a deeper, more intense taste of the man she loved. Their tongues slid and rubbed, wrestling in a way that was nothing like the wrestling of their youth.

Between one heartbeat and the next, something snapped inside Stevie’s head, completely unleashing the primitive drives of both the woman and Sentinel inside. Everything ceased to exist except for her bond mate and the need to make him hers. 

Raising her head, Steve growled low in her throat and shoved him hard. His body slammed back against the wall. She took a single moment to memorize the sight of his gorgeous limbs sprawled akimbo, throat arched back and topped by wet and swollen lips tilting in a smug and challenging grin as he greeted her strength unflinchingly, before she pounced, resuming her sensory feast. 

Steve slid her tongue deep into his mouth with a purr, exploring her new territory and memorizing the textures and tastes inside. She pawed at the collar of his shirt, ripping it wider to expose the sweet flesh of his neck. An enticing growl rumbled from Bucky’s chest to hers as he slid his metal hand up to grip the short strands of her hair and pressed her closer, widening his lips and encouraging her to delve deeper, to stop holding back, that he not only could, but wanted to take anything and everything she could throw at him. 

Ripping her lips from his mouth, she licked down the salty column of his throat, his flavor exploding on her tongue like mythical ambrosia. Moaning, Steve set her teeth into the cords of his neck and bit down slowly until the merest hint of blood burst across her senses. Immediately lifting her teeth, she laved her tongue over the marks until his serum healed the punctures, delighting in each minute change in his body as she claimed him with teeth and blood. 

Following instinct, Steve bit her tongue hard and then returned to his lips, giving back to her Guide what she’d claimed by right as his Sentinel. The sharpness of the blood-flavored kiss mellowed into sweet, drugging pleasure as the kiss went on and on. Stevie pressed herself as close as she could get against his hard body, frustrated by the clothes separating the rub and slide of their skin, but not having the focus to stop kissing him for even a second to rip them off. 

Gradually she became aware of questing mental tendrils sliding across the surface of her mind, each touch flavored with the essence of Bucky, her perfect match, her Guide. They nudged and probed around the edges of Stevie’s natural mental shields, shields she hadn’t even been aware of until that moment. Unhesitatingly. Stevie stripped herself bare of defenses, giving her Guide free rein to enter and do as he willed. She had chosen to trust him with everything and would not hold back now. 

A wash of heaven song swelled through every corner of her body as her Guide nestled down and filled the empty spot deep in her soul, making himself at home. Driven to protect her most valuable person and the bond they now shared, she instinctively forged a mental shield tougher than vibranium and encircled her Guide’s mind in shining silver energy, protecting him from unwanted mental intrusions. Pure love saturated their bond, tying them together as Sentinel and Guide so tightly that nothing but death could threaten it, and even there, she felt that their spirits could move on together instead of being parted. 

Her body vibrated with primal energy, all focused on claiming every mouthwatering inch of the man in her arms. She couldn’t wait another second. The need was burning through her veins. Steve shifted her grip to pull him down to the floor and finally make herself immune to unicorns.

Before she could complete the action, freezing cold water slammed into her from multiple directions. Yelping, Steve and Bucky jumped apart, arousal quickly turning to anger. Ice cubes stuck to her skin like leeches as arctic water streamed down her face and saturated her clothing. They both had traumatic experiences related to freezing and really, really hated being cold. 

Spinning around with fists raised, Stevie had to pull herself up short at being confronted with the bright sparking of Natasha’s Widow’s Bite. The stench of ozone filled her nostrils, diluting the intoxicating scent of her Guide. It made her angry.

“Cool off and think about where you are for a second,” Natasha ordered, not lowering her weapons and the threat of painful electrocution. Being wet made the shock of the Widow’s Bite hurt even worse, as water conducted the electricity more efficiently and delivered a higher voltage.

“Look,” Tony said, stepping forward to collect a set of dripping buckets from both Bruce and Phil with forced nonchalance, “I was perfectly happy to be a voyeur and let you both come to a very X-rated conclusion, but Coulson insisted on preserving the modesty of his precious Captain America and Sergeant Barnes and vetoed the internet sex tape.” He dropped the stack of buckets onto the nearest seat. “Once we land you can get a private room. As I recall, you can get a whole suite, since Steve’s has been kept available and has a multitude of flat surfaces for you two to christen. Now, are you back with me, cavemen?”

Flicking water off her face, Steve blew out her breath and looked at Bucky out of the corner of her eye. He touched her mind soothingly, sharing her frustration and passing on a promise. She couldn’t help but turn to him like a flower raising its face to the sun. The intimacy of their new bond was the most amazing thing she’d ever felt. They exchanged a private smile. 

Someone cleared their throat loudly.

“Yes, we’re back,” Steve said, reluctantly turning to look at her team instead of Bucky.

Natasha took a step back and powered down her weapons with a twist of her wrists. She shook her head incredulously. “Wow, I can’t believe you actually bonded. I’ve never heard of that even being possible without sex.” Jealousy and wistfulness threaded through her words.

“Bonding is legally considered a marriage. You’re married now,” Bruce said in a shell-shocked voice.

The knowledge filled Steve with bone-deep satisfaction.

“Wait, what?” Bucky asked with a frown that worried Steve until she realized it was disappointment at not having an actual ceremony. She’d forgotten that he could be more sentimental than she was when it came to things like that. 

“Just as well they stopped before the big deed. It’s time to land and I would’ve crashed the jet if they’d kept on making noises like that,” Clint called back, making Steve’s face turn bright red and distracting both her and Bucky.

Leaning over the back of a chair, Tony rested his chin in his hands. "Okay, so is Steve really a girl or not? And did the serum make Steve into a Sentinel or was Cap just a latent Sentinel the whole time and came fully Online with the serum?" 

"Does it matter?" Phil asked.

"No, but I want to know!" Tony answered petulantly. “Since Steve was a dick to disappear on us without telling anyone, he— _ she? _ has to tell us the truth. Steve, do you have a penis, did the serum give you a psudopenis, or are you rocking girl parts in your pants?” 

The plane touched down gently on the top of Avengers Tower.

“Tony!” Steve exclaimed in a strangled tone of voice. She could feel Bucky inching closer to violence. He wasn’t used to her team’s banter and teasing.

“You’re just trying to get Steve to say penis, since he wouldn’t at the drive-in.” Natasha poked Tony hard in the shoulder. 

“Maybe, but it’s still a relevant question,’ Tony defended, curling away from her attack.

“Steve never did say the word penis,” Clint opined as the quinjet set down on the roof of Avengers tower. 

“C’mon Steve, answer the question,” Bruce teased. “Enquiring minds want to know about the penis.”

“Or you could just lift up the dress,” Tony suggested salaciously. “The hospital gown peaking out suggests the lack of any underwear.”

Bucky growled and drew a knife. “You sneak a peek and I’ll stab out your eyeballs.”

“Or not,” Clint suggested quickly, unstrapping his harness and moving to the exit. “Tony was only kidding. Mostly. So apologize to the homicidal Guide, Tony.”

“Sure,” Tony said without an ounce of sincerity. As he hopped out of the jet, he turned to walk backwards. “Well, Rogers?”

Everyone filed out onto the roof of Avengers Tower, leaving Steve to go last as per tradition. Standing in the doorway looking around at everything she’d ever wanted, Steve couldn’t help but forget her embarrassment and laugh with joy. “Okay, fine.”

“Wait, is Cap actually about to give us a Marilyn Monroe moment?” Clint put his hands on his cheeks and went to swoon against Phil’s shoulder dramatically. Phil shook his head and sidestepped adroitly, causing Clint to fall. Reaching out, Phil yanked Clint back up before he could hit the ground. Despite the near miss, both men seemed amused by their byplay.

“I don’t know who that is, but I’m going to take a wild guess and just say no,” Steve answered. “As for the rest, I do not now nor have I ever had a... penis.” 

The Avengers began clapping and cheering as if Captain America had just punched out Hitler on the USO tour. Tony wolf whistled and Clint stomped his feet. Who knew it would only take Steve using a dirty word to get this sort of reaction?

Waiting over by the elevator, Pepper saw Steve in the red dress and heard her make her grand pronouncement. She squeaked in shock, fingers flying up to cover her mouth. No one else seemed to notice her over the raucous hilarity.

“Okay okay,” Tony said, wiping away tears of mirth as he wound down. “I’ve got to ask another thing, are you going to go around wearing dresses now?” His face sobered, “And what about going Feral on us again, are you going to do that too?"

Steve climbed out of the quinjet, carefully considering her answer and making sure her skirt didn’t fly up and show anything she didn’t want it to. People started shuffling towards the exit as she pondered. Bucky fell in at her side. "I don’t know, Tony. Maybe if I feel the need to, why? You got a problem with that? Going to kick me out like they did to Mulan?" Steve felt the muscles in her back going tense, but tried not to let on otherwise how much the answer meant to her.

"OMG Steve, no!” Tony threw up his hands. “We are not a Disney movie! No, I just want to be prepared to document it. For science! And posterity! And so I can post it on the Internet and find a way to publicly humiliate you with it, all in the name of friendship." 

Phil crossed his arms like a disapproving nanny. "No, Stark."

Tony produced a winning smile and ignored Phil. "But we're friends. Right, Steve?"

Unable to answer with levity, Steve looked Tony dead in the eyes. "Yes, Tony, we’re good friends. The best. Thank you for understanding. It means a lot to me." She respected Tony so much, even when they approached a problem in different ways. Losing him would be like losing family.

Swallowing and looking away at Steve’s earnestness, Tony cleared his throat, uncomfortable with that much sincerity. "Yeah, well…,” he turned back with mask back in place and wagged his brows, “at least I don't have to worry that you'll steal Pepper's heart anymore with that ‘aw shucks, ma'am,’ flirtatious thing you do with her sometimes."

Walking past Steve with a slinky stride that did bad things to Steve’s recently cooled libido, Bucky smirked challengingly at Tony. "No, you still have to worry about Stevie. I'm the straight one.” Phil choked on his spit and began to cough over Clint’s peal of laughter. “Remember Peggy? Stevie's Bi. She’d be quite happy with her own little harem of feisty beauties. I'm sure Pepper would fit right in with me." 

Steve’s face felt like it was on fire. 

Turning his head to look at the leggy strawberry blond hovering by the elevator, Bucky smiled with his whole body, a sight that always drew Steve’s gaze like a magnet. His Brooklyn accent thickened as he engaged with Pepper. "Whaddaya say, Doll? Wanna leave this loser and come home with me and Stevie? The name’s James Barnes. If the metal plate in Stark’s chest is a fetish," he flourished his metal arm, "mine's bigger and more articulated." 

While Tony sputtered and Clint cackled, Pepper pretended to consider it, looking Bucky up in down slowly and letting her eyes linger on his best parts. 

Bucky preened beneath the look. "I'd say that you could come too, Stark, since you're almost as pretty as me, but no dicks in the bed but mine. Well, unless Pepper wants to introduce Stevie to strap-ons." He wagged his brows.

Natasha and Clint were practically busting a gut, they were laughing so hard. Even Phil had lost his calm facade. 

Confused, but knowing that Bucky had just suggested something very dirty by the reactions of everyone else, Steve scowled and felt her face somehow turn even hotter. She knew Bucky was only joking about having Pepper join in, that he’d cut anyone that even tried to muscle in on their new bond, but she still didn’t like it. If Bucky wanted to posture with Tony, he could do it without involving her or dirty jokes.

Unable to hold a straight face any longer, Pepper broke into chuckles. "You and Steve are very tempting, James, but regretfully I'm going to have to say no." She held out her hand and wiggled her fingers at Tony. “I’m quite happily taken.”

“You’re darn-tootin right you are, for the old folks in the room trying to flirt with you inappropriately,” Tony said loudly, wrapping Pepper in his arms and dropping a devoted kiss on her pale red hair.

Looking sly, Nat sauntered forward, prompting them all to climb into the elevator. As soon as the door closed, she pounced. "Don't worry, Steve. I'll buy you one if Pepper won’t. What consenting adults get up to is their business. You can figure it out with James.” Leaning her weight on one leg, she cocked her hand on her hip and grinned.

Standing between Nat and Clint in the crowded elevator, Phil pulled out his phone at Clint’s prompting and typed something into it for the archer, making Clint’s smile go wide as they put their heads together and scrolled down the screen. “I don’t think…,” Phil started to say before trailing off. “Oh, okay, nevermind. I’ve never browsed that section.”

“That was a lie,” Nat singsonged, tucking her head down next to Phil’s to see the screen.

“I haven’t browsed it in a very long time. How’s that?” Phil asked snootily, the tips of his ears going red.

All three were standing very close, closer than necessary despite the crowded elevator and phone, which seemed strange considering their initially strained greeting and how physically aloof Black Widow and Agent Coulson acted around most other people. Then again, Steve remembered what Phil had said about missing his “stars.”

Typing something rapidly into Phil’s phone, Clint dodged Natasha’s snatch and looked up with a manic grin. "There you go! I just ordered one for Cap in red, white, and blue. Hopefully it will get here in time for the honeymoon." 

"That's it, I'm leaving," Steve announced as the elevator mercifully dinged open on the shared floor used by all members of the team. Maybe she could take the stairs from here back to the roof and throw herself off, save herself from more embarrassment. 

Bucky caught her arm halfway across the room and reeled her back into his chest with a laugh. "Look at this adorable blush. We're all just teasing in fun. You're gorgeous, sweetheart, and you got nothing to be ashamed about. Nothing about you is shameful. You gotta know that I've always loved you. I even forgive you for making me the most popular pinup girl on the Brooklyn docks." He chucked her under the chin.

Stevie squirmed guiltily until Bucky caught her eye. "Even if I’d found out then,” he said seriously, “it wouldn’t have mattered. I adored you too much to care. Everyone but you seemed to cotton on to it quick enough, considering the ear-twistings I got from everyone. I love you, you punk, from the little shrimp wearing my second-best Sunday tie to the big strapping Sentinel chasing an amnesiac assassin across Europe. I don't care how you dress or cut your hair, or if you'll be charging shield-first at bullies for the rest of your life. I'm your best friend and your Guide and I will always have your six." 

Stevie couldn't help but give him a stupidly besotted smile. Bucky kissed her nose and added more light-heartedly, "Especially when you wear such tight pants."

"You're an idiot," Stevie declared, pivoting on her heel and stalking from the room. 

A few seconds after she’d disappeared down the hallway, her voice shouted impatiently, "Are you coming or what?"

"Yes, Dear, coming, Dear!" Bucky caroled. 

“No coming in this tower, Mister. Not until you put a ring on that young lady’s finger,” Stark wagged his finger in his best impression of a stern Dad voice.

Barton rolled his eyes and hopped over the back of the couch, landing in a sprawl. “Seriously Tony? From you? Besides, like Bruce said, bonding is legally recognized as a marriage by the US government, not that you’ve ever shown much respect for the institution.”

Finger still in the air, Stark paused. “Good point. I can’t even say don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, because I’ve done just about everything but get married, though there was this foggy weekend in Vegas once, but my lawyers handled that. I think.” 

He dropped his hand and sent Bucky a surprisingly serious look. “Barnes, we care about Steve and Steve cares about you. Don’t screw this up or we’ll come down on you like a dinosaur destroying meteor raining fire and ash. With that said… congratulations, have fun, and welcome to the Avengers.”

Bucky nodded, surprised by Stark’s willingness to bury the hatchet. He didn’t mind the threat. Stark didn’t understand how a bond worked or how willing Bucky was to break himself before ever hurting Steve again.

From the couch Barton added, “Take good care of Steve. He— _ She _ deserves to be happy. You both do, from one formerly brainwashed sniper to another.” 

“You Avengers are alright,” Bucky said. “Thanks for taking so well to Stevie. I’m here to stay, so I’ll see you around.” 

Before he could leave, Barton held up his hand with a friendly smirk. “High five?” 

Shaking his head, Bucky nevertheless gave Barton a high five. 

Natasha appeared next to the couch and held up her hand with a challenging look on her face, the unspoken weight of their past in her eyes. Nodding solemnly, Bucky gave her a high five too. She nodded back, message received.

“Well now you’ve started a trend. Do a victory lap and give a high five to everyone, Barnes,” Stark insisted, holding out his hand and beckoning. “You’ve won the championship by bonding with a catch like Captain America! C’mon Coulson, Bruce, join in and be team players. High fives!”

Barton vaulted over the couch in an acrobatic move and landed next to Natasha with his arms in the air. “Line of high fives, like in the sports movies!”

“The other guy does love sports movies,” Banner said, leaving the kitchen and an open box of tea to join them.

“You’re not serious?” Bucky asked, nonplussed, which prompted the rest of them to fall in line in a mad dash and hold out their hands. They stared at him expectantly.

“Congratulations on finally making Steve happy to be alive,” Natasha said dryly, a smile teasing her lips. “Hip hip hooray.”

“Hip hip hooray!” Stark cheered, pulling in a giggling Pepper Potts to line up with the rest of the team.

“Congratulations,” Pepper smiled.

Unable to keep from laughing at the lunatics he’d just signed on with, Bucky gave into the crazy, punched his hands into the air like a prize fighter and then jogging down the line, handing out high fives to everyone. He made sure to hit Pepper’s hand softly and Stark’s hard. 

When he turned to finally race out of the room after his Sentinel, he found Stevie leaning in the doorway, smiling at them all softly. “Thanks, guys.” 

She met Bucky’s eyes and pulled on an expression of mock sternness. “As for you, Guide, snap to it! I’ve got plans for you.”

Snapping into a parade perfect salute, Bucky cried, “Yes, Sir, Sentinel Captain Queen Rogers, Sir!”

Chuckling, Steve turned sideways in the doorway to let him pass. “I’ll give you a ten second head start to reach my rooms two floors down. After that, I keep what I catch. Make it worth my while.”

Striding past her, Bucky dropped a kiss on her lips. Steve smiled and turned to follow his lips. As soon as she turned, he reached out like a striking snake and slapped her on the behind, taking off down the hallway like a shot. “Catch me if you can!”

“Why you!” Steve exclaimed in shock, reaching back to rub her abused rump to the laughter of her teammates. “You’re going to pay for that! One, two, three—” Counting down the promised ten seconds, Steve took off in a sprint, following the scent of her bright future.

THE END   
  


  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for taking this journey with me! It ended up being over three times longer than I expected. I'd really appreciate knowing if you liked the completed story and what parts you enjoyed. Thanks to the all-stars who commented as chapters went up. I love you guys! 
> 
> Stay tuned for a followup story staring Phil, Clint, and Natasha called, "Not 5 by 5." It is 85% written right now, so I just have to finish it and edit before I start posting. You guys are the best!


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